When more isn`t better: aligning policies and outcomes in ecology

RAU, JAIME R.; ANDERSON, CHRISTOPHER B.; PIZARRO, CRISTOBAL; MONJEAU, ADRIAN

Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America

Wiley

Lugar: Washington, DC; Año: 2017 vol. 98 p. 338 - 340

Recently, we and others have called attention to the fact that science policies should be structured to achieve our overall intellectual and social objectives. Using this rubric to test a policy?s ?theoretical adequacy?, there is a growing consensus regarding the insufficiency of measuring a publication?s (or a scientist?s) quality by inference from the Impact Factor of the journal where an article is published.At the same time, though, another policy that has been widely disseminated is the promotion of publication quantity. On the one hand, the ?publish or perish? culture has been implicated in affecting the quality of life of scientists themselves. At the same time, this approach may also have negative effects on scientific quality (Sarewitz 2016). For example, it could lead researchers to reduce their publications to ?least publishable units? or de-incentivize important synthesis or interdisciplinaryapproaches that require more time.In particular, we have called upon Latin American ecologists and conservationists to question such proposals, rather than simply apply global models (Monjeau et al. 2013, 2015). Research paradigms clearly influence not just scientific studies, but also conservation outcomes (Mace 2014). To further explore the effects of existing ?Northern? approaches to ecological research in our ?Southern? countries, we measured the ?productivity? (number of publications) and ?impact? (measured as h-index)for the ecology articles produced in Argentina and Chile. The analysis was done for publications in the ISI Web of Science database from 1975 to 2015, dividing results per discrete 5-year periods.