Winning the Publications Game - 4th Edition (2016)

Know the game 7
of science – are approved, published and disseminated.
It’s a powerful thought and a comforting view.
The truth about scientific articles
It also happens to be a naive and unduly rosy view. Dr
Stephen Lock, former editor of the BMJ, has written:
‘The journals are serving the community poorly. Many
articles are neither read nor cited; indeed many articles
are poor. In general, medical journals seem to be of little
practical help to clinicians facing problems at the bedside
. . . Scientific articles have been hijacked away from
their primary role of communicating scientific discovery
to one of demonstrating academic activity. No more are
grant- giving bodies basing awards on the quality of scientific
research; the emphasis has switched to quantity.’ 1
The performance of journals does not always live
up to the glowing picture painted of them. One major
problem is that the peer- review system, for all its intricacies,
does not guarantee that the bad will be weeded
out or even that the good will be published in the most
appropriate journal. There has been a small but steady
stream of cases of authors copying data from a previously
published article (plagiarism), publishing the same
article twice (duplicate publication) or simply inventing
data (fraud).
Nor do all the efforts of reviewing guarantee that
papers will be good, as opposed to mediocre. The comments
of others can be invaluable, but they can also have
the effect of promoting conservatism and disparaging
innovation. There is a danger that, by the time articles