Publish-or-Perish Perspectives: Dividing Coauthors, Valuing Referees, Taming Expectations

One could argue that the publish-or-perish system is now working to the disadvantage of science: The noise is drowning out the signal. Mohamed Gad-el-Hak makes good suggestions for alternative, more quality-sensitive ways than raw paper count to measure one’s effective contribution.

I suggest that quality will quickly improve at the expense of volume if academic departments or journals or both properly recognize the task of refereeing. I believe that refereeing should be elevated to a status approaching that of paper authorship; the contribution to science of a good referee’s report identifying some fundamental error and barring publication is greater, perhaps, than the contribution of several mediocre published papers. To implement such elevated status, departments could simply agree to count the refereeing beans along with those for authorship. And journals could publish referees’ names along with an accepted paper—does anonymity really exist in the present system? Referees rejecting papers should also be acknowledged somehow.