Get involved in publishing,” he advised. “If you get invited to review, then do the review. You learn so much by reviewing. —Michael Benninger, MD
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March 2022
There has been a significant increase in the number of indexed articles since 1975, in part due to the dawn of open access journals, some of which are associated with academies and are typically of good quality, and some of which are based on author-paid publishing fees that sustain the journal, and whose content might be more suspect.
“With any very well-done published journal that has an associated online open-access journal, the open-access journal is probably fairly good,” Dr. Benninger said during his presentation. The number of open-access journals has recently plateaued, possibly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but possibly because they’ve hit a saturation point, he added.
He also made some observations about medical publishing:
The dominance of China. China is rapidly becoming dominant in relation to the total number of articles published, he said. The total number of publications produced by the United States has fallen in recent years, but those out of China have increased, surpassing several European countries, including the United Kingdom (Johnson R, Watkinson A, Michael M. STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly publishing, fifth edition. Published October 2018.)
Increased scrutiny of author contribution. The number of citations of the top 1% cited articles has not changed much during recent years. Also, he said, the average author hasn’t increased the number of articles they publish, but there has been an increase in coauthorship. This has led to increased scrutiny of author contribution.
“One of the things that the journals are doing is really wanting to know how you participate,” he said. “Why are you an author? Why do you deserve to be an author? Authorship becomes very, very important, and if you’re going to put your name on something, you should have contributed meaningfully.”
The prominence of the P value. The prominence of the P value continues to be a concern in medical publishing, Dr. Benninger said. He noted that the threshold value itself was chosen arbitrarily—the P value threshold could easily have been 0.025 or 0.1—he said, and the P value can often be misused.
But a given P value doesn’t really measure whether or not a treatment is more effective, Dr. Benninger explained. “A lot of people just throw numbers into a computer to get a P value that’s under 0.05, so now they say something is statistically significant when they really haven’t done a power analysis,” he said. “So most people are really relying on other things.”