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January Weiner
@january3.github.io

🧪 A fascinating article quantifying changes in academic publishing over the past few years. It shows clear differences between the publishers. Also: MDPI growth of IF comes mostly from self-citations! #science #publishing

Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social

The strain on scientific publishing: we set out to characterise the remarkable growth of the scientific literature in the last few years, in spite of declining growth in total scientists. What is going on? direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... A 🧵 1/n #AcademicSky #PhDchat #ScientificPublishing #SciPub

6 reposts16 likes

Matt Whyndham
@betadiversion3.bsky.social

scratches beard ... a better metric, to my mind, is a comparison of two stock levels, e.g. the number of relevant articles a given scientist has to deal with in order to make a contribution. Which might not include actually reading them (thanks, AI!). This data compares a stock and *flow*.

January Weiner
@january3.github.io

Well, this article compares many different things, usually between publishers. This one diagram is not necessarily representative of the whole article. Although later they also show how the number of references increases (and causes impact factor inflation, which is also an issue).

Paolo Crosetto
@paolocrosetto.bsky.social

Hello, coauthor here. Indeed the metric you propose would be accurate: but it could be hard to get reliable & complete data. I don't think we compare a stock & a flow, it's # new articles in year t vs # new researchers in year t. That impressive growth? Yes, that's not a cumulative curve!