Consider this claim
Quality is more important than quantity
I expect few people would disagree with it, and yet we do not always act as if it were true. In Academia, when considering candidates to hire or promote, we count their papers, their citations, their funding, their software download rates, their graduated students, the number of their committee memberships or journal editorships, and more.
Researchers are getting the message: quantity matters. Ugo Bardi proposes the economic underpinnings of this apparent trend, cleverly arguing that scientific papers are currency, subject to phenomena like inflation (more papers!), assaying (peer review validates papers, which support funding proposals, which finance more papers), and counterfeiting (papers published without review by unscrupulous publishers). Moshe Vardi, in a recent blog post, concurs that “we have slid down the slippery path of using quantity as a proxy for quality” and that “the inflationary pressure to publish more and more encourages speed and brevity, rather than careful scholarship.”[ref]Update 8/21/2016: As more evidence of the problem, here’s a great retrospective from the editor of a top journal in sociology points to quantity greatly devaluing quality.[/ref]
In this post I consider the problem of incentivizing, and assessing, research quality, starting with a recent set of guidelines put out by the CRA. I conclude with a set of questions—I hope you will share your opinion. Continue reading