MB Lanktree

PA Doevendans

T Opthof

English

PubMed

P. A. Doevendans

Springer - Publisher Connector

To publish or not to publish.......

EDITORIAL
To publish or not to publish.......
P. A. Doevendans
Published online: 7 June 2011
# The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Where is the time that science was for purity and fun? That
era is long gone and has been replaced by publish or perish.
The success of a scientist must be expressed in numbers.
Therefore, now in 2011 we have this unstoppable train of
ever growing numbers of publications and with that,
increasing numbers of journals. Must be overwhelming if
one enters the scientific arena as a highly motivated student
to face the challenge to sort the value from the ballast. In
the May issue of the Netherlands Heart Journal, Opthof and
Wilde published the outcome of their struggle to create
some order in the citation jungle [1]. This is a very noble
attempt as the difficulties they faced are tremendous. For
the analysis presented they used several parameters
obtained through the Web of Science published by
Thomson Reuters. This is a well-established source to
obtain information on citation frequency and impact. The
outcome is not really surprising showing the outstanding
performance in this respect by Patrick Serruys, the best
cited cardiologist residing in the Netherlands.
Several trends are described in the manuscript that are
crucial to understand the process of the publication tsunami
that has gained enough power to hit the scientific society.
For many things in life, money is a key driving factor. For a
scientist funding is related to output. Funding brings
funding. Funding brings PhD students who have to publish
enough papers to provide a defendable thesis in 3–4 years.
Which several years later brings some additional funding to
the hosting institute. For every actor, a rock solid CV with
high impact publications is crucial when applying for
national and international grants. In some institutes budgets
are determined partially based on scientific performance
judged by the numbers as described in the article. Not to
publish is not an option.
The tsunami that has already passed the beach involves
genetics. The size of the population studied is increasing as
well as the number of authors on the papers. There are
papers appearing with > 100 authors, not in the acknowl-
edgement but really on the paper [2]. Just imagine what
these papers will do to a Hirsch index if all authors cite the
paper just once. Especially if this is your field of interest
and a series of these papers are published. It is easy to
foresee that the 107 score by Serruys will not be the
maximum in the future.
In the article the authors already conclude that the
various parameters provide very different rankings. There-
fore the ultimate assessment of scientific impact is still up
in the air. In addition, a quick check of the data presented in
the paper already shows a deviation of 20% of under
reporting for authors with an uncommon name and
pollution for authors with a more common name. In
addition if an alternative system is used, such as Scopus
provided by Elsevier, again very different numbers and
rankings appear. So although the paper is accepted in a
scientific journal, the reproducibility of the data has not
been established. Even when one is willing to spend the
time and effort to try to provide clean data, it is not easy. It
is safe to support the most important conclusion of the
study: ‘Therefore citation analysis should be applied with
great care in science policy’.
The newest trend in funding is the formation of private-
public consortia (BMM, CTMM, NIRM). Here, the
economic impact of the science is central in the evaluation.
What will be the return through translation and product
development to our national economy? The same trend is
observed for European funding. Eventually our system to
judge the impact of science on society will have to cover
these aspects as well [2]. Is the intellectual property well
P. A. Doevendans (*)
University Medical Centre Utrecht,
Postbus 85500, 3508 GA Utrecht, the Netherlands
e-mail: p.a.doevendans@umcutrecht.nl
Neth Heart J (2011) 19:271–272
DOI 10.1007/s12471-011-0168-3
protected? Are there products coming to the market and do
we create jobs? [3]. In the University Medical Centre
Utrecht (UMCU) we would like to develop a tool to also
incorporate this impact factor into the UMCU/index. It may
happen that the number of jobs created in the future will be
more important than the number of citations. And hopefully
we will be able to go way above the 107 when creating jobs
in cardiology related industry. Science is still fun, more
then ever. However the purity of science for the sake of
science is in danger.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which per-
mits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
References
1. Opthof T, Wilde AAM. Bibliometric data in clinical cardiology
revisited: the case of 37 Dutch professors. Neth Heart J.
2011;19:245–55.
2. Lanktree MB, Guo Y, Murtaza M, et al. Meta-analysis of dense
genecentric association studies reveals common and uncommon
variants associated with height. Am J Hum Genet. 2011;88:6–
18.
3. Doevendans PA. From concept to product in cardiology. Neth Heart
J. 2009;17:319.
272 Neth Heart J (2011) 19:271–272


Crossref

Netherlands Heart Journal

Bibliometric data in clinical cardiology revisited: the case of 37 Dutch professors.

From concept to product in cardiology.

Meta-analysis of dense genecentric association studies reveals common and uncommon variants associated with height.

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To publish or not to publish.......

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