Integrity Under Attack: The State of Scholarly Publishing

Scientific journals are surely important. They provide the most effective means for disseminating and archiving scientific results, and so are a key part of an enterprise on which our health, security, and prosperity ultimately depend. Publications are used by universities, funding agencies, and others as a primary measure of research productivity and impact. They play a decisive role in hiring, promotion, and salary decisions, and in the ranking of departments, institutions, even nations. With big rewards tied to publication, it is not surprising that some people engage in unethical behavior, abuse, and downright fraud. Still, when I started to look at the issues more closely, I was appalled by what I found. In this column, I give a few troubling examples of misconduct by authors and by journals in applied mathematics. One conclusion I draw is that common bibliometrics—such as the impact factor for journals and citation counts for authors—are easily manipulated not only in theory, but also in practice, and that their use in ranking and judging should be curtailed.