How Many is too Many? On the Relationship between Output and Impact in Research

Over the last few decades, the massification of quantitative evaluations of science and their institutionalisation in several countries has led many researchers to aim at publishing as much as possible. This paper assesses the potential adverse effects of this behaviour by analysing the relationship between individual researchers’ productivity and their proportion of highly cited papers. In other words, does the share of an author’s top 1% most cited papers increase, decrease or remain stable, as her number of total papers increase? Using a large dataset of disambiguated researchers (N= 25,994,021) over the 1980-2012 period, this paper shows that the higher the number of papers a researcher publishes, the more likely they are amongst the most cited in their domain. This relationship was stronger for older cohorts of researchers, while decreasing returns to scale were observed in some domains for more recent cohorts. On the whole, these results suggest that at the macro-level, the culture of publishing as many papers as possible did not yield to adverse effects in terms of impact, especially for older researchers. For such researchers, who have had a long period of time to accumulate scientific capital, there can never be too many papers. Conference Topic Science Policy and Research Assessment