Publication efficiency

high-resolution terminology - matching measurements at high-resolution

Publication efficiency

Description

Publication efficiency

Abbreviation: Fr,a

Reference: MitoFit 2020.4

Communicated by Gnaiger Erich (2020-07-07) last update 2020-07-21
in: Anastrophe XX Entity X and elementary unit x of A X-mass Carol

Canon IIIIII: To publish or buglish — a question of perish

Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools — with yesterday's concepts. — Marshall McLuhan Herbert, Fiore Quentin (1967) The Medium is the Massage — »Bioblast link«.

Communication and value of science has been based on paper, from the papyrus of ancient Agypt to the transformations that enlarged the pressure to publish and were brought about by the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg. Metal typesetting used fonts of different sizes with a fixed metal mass of each sort of type in a typeface. Today the body mass index of a printed character is called the weight of a font, which is the thickness of the graphical outlines divided by the height of a character. Pressing a button on a photocopy machine produces or rather consumes a lot of papers in the age of the xerographic (dry graphic) technology. In the modern digital world of the internet and pdf files we are still using the 15^th century vocabulary of the printing press when talking about a scientific paper that makes or breaks a scientific career in the service of impact factors, and we are still referring to the physical transport by courier services when spelling out pdf as portable data format. Scientists have to have the paper in press to make an impression on the scientific community. Even preprints give the impression, that printing is performed by application of mechanical pressure. The digital revolution has transformed the culture of scientific publication in physics and mathematics, but a fundamental liberation from a concept fixed on paper(s) is yet to be realized in the biomedical field (Gnaiger 2019 MitoFit Preprint Arch Editorial).

Every scientific communication of value requires realization in the sense of the word that has more than two sides: (1) a physical realization of the communication as a publication available in one or several media (e.g., video and pdf version of a publication), (2) a virtual realization of the publication as the cognitive process of decoding the potential meassage in the publication media into a realized message, received in the mental media of somebody who minds to comprehend the meaning of the message, and (3) back in an Ouroboros loop to a physical realization of the communication in the form of an innovation, as a new artefact with value in the real world — e.g., a new motivation procedure to increase the number of physically active people; a new drug with less negative side effects; a new counting or measuring instrument that is more economical and produces less instrumental artefacts.

Every step in these three phases of realization of a scientific innovation is valuable, and is evaluated differently by individual people in their own way on their way to success. Collectively, however, only real-world artefacts or facts have value in the global fight against the crises of injustice in peace and war, global warming, irreversible loss of natural and cultural diversity, overpopulation of the sick and underpopulation of the healthy. Although these real-world artefacts resulting from the realization of scientific innovation may be positive as the goods of cultural tools or negative as the bads of war within the species and against other species and resources, the scientific innovations realized as artefacts or facts are drivers of human cultural evolution. Therefore, a reflection on the realization potential and validation of a scientific communication has its value.

"No one knows how many scientific journals there are, but several estimates point to around 30,000, with close to two million articles published each year." — Altbach Philip G, de Wit Hans (2018) Too much academic research is being published. Univ World News retrieved 2020-07-14. — This makes close to 5 500 publications per day. If you are working during the week and reading during the weekend, then there are more than 19000 new publications per weekend day.

Compared to browsing through publications in the (physical room of a) library, browsing through the internet and specifically PubMed has changed retrieval of literature fundamentally. Table 6.1 summarizes some examples relevant for the X-mass Carol.

Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old. — Marshall McLuhan Herbert, Fiore Quentin (1967) The Medium is the Massage — »Bioblast link«.

Table 6.1. Publication overload: PubMed counts for publications in 2019 and 2009 on BMI and mitochondrial search terms individually (#1 and #2) and combined (#3). There was a 1.7- to 1.8-fold increase within 10 years in all three categories, indicating that growth in the more prominent research field BMI (mt/BMI=0.8) was as high as in the mt-research field. Only 0.43 % of all BMI-linked publications included the term mitochondria.

Search term #	PubMed Search term	Count 2019	Count 2009	Count per day 2019	Count per weekend day 2019
		x	x	x/day	x/weekend day
1	BMI or Body mass index	25310	13861	69	243
2	mitochondr*	19994	11583	55	192
3	1 and 2	108	62	0.3	1.0

Figure 6.1. Number of publications on mitochondria per year. Nobel price laureates are marked who are particularly relevant for mitochondrial physiology and bioenergetics, and the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. Data on publication counts retrieved from PubMed 2020-07-17.

We face a massive problem. The counts in Table 6.1 do not allow us to turn the pages to the list of references and re-read the messages in the cited publications. The probability of finding a (truly) groundbreaking innovation contained in a rejected or published paper is close to but not equal to zero. Therefore, only a high number of published papers realized by a readership of open minds can manage to increase the probability, that the 'true' innovation, which is not only rare but extremeley difficult to comprehend, will be realized or implemented and applied in the real world. Highly simplified models of 'Meaningful-innovation-Publications' (MiP) provide guidelines for reflecting on and optimization of publication strategies.

The static MiP model

1. The number of published papers per unit of time (per year, per day, per weekend day) is N_p. The time unit has to be specified.
2. The number of irreproducible publications N_z of zero positive but potentially negative value is high, with an irreproducibility ratio F_z/p = N_z/N_p ≈ 0.85 (Ioannidis et al 2014).
3. The number of valuable, reproducible publications N_r can be split into innovative N_i and confirmative publications N_c. Bayesian statistics provides a solid proof of concept, that it is irresponsible scientific commercialism, if confirmative publications are suppressed in so-called 'high-impact' journals. The immens value of methodologically sound confirmative communications requires full appreciation, as does the importance of reproducibly contradictory results. It is difficult but important to define the drivers of scientific commercialism among authors, editors, and businesses, and to distinguish re-search oriented publishing of scientific literature from commerce oriented buglishing in low- or high-impact journals which are predatory to the same extent. The underrating of methodologically and statistically rigorous confirmative and contradictory results promotes escape strategies of presenting conformative results, which please the commercialism of publication by mainstream-delusion. These considerations justify an emphasis on reproducible publications N_r — including publications providing the test of reproducibility of published innovative results — and a simple discrimination between reproducible and zero-value publications, N_p = N_r+N_z. The reproducibility efficiency is F_r/p = N_r/N_p.
4. The reproducibility crisis expressed by the low reproducibility efficiency F_r/p has to be put into the context of a hyper-exponentially growing inflation crisis of publication. The count N_p of all publications is split into a count of publications N_a that receive attention and meaningful interpretation, and a count of publications N_n that is neglected, N_p = N_a+N_n. If N_p exceeds N_a, then there is an inflation cisis of producing a paper mass excess (PME), as a process which diminishes the value of each elementary paper U_p. The inflation crisis is expressed by the low attention efficiency F_a/p = N_a/N_p. The concepts of PME and BME are not isomorphic.

The introductory analysis of the reproducibility and inflation crisis (r- and n-crisis) of scientific publications is summarized in the following definitions and equations, all of which are oversimplified symbols of reality.

(Eq. 6.1a) Publication count r-crisis: Np = Nr + Nz
(Eq. 6.1b) Reproducible publication count: Nr = Np - Nz

(Eq. 6.2a) Publication count n-crisis: Np = Na + Nn
(Eq. 6.2b) Attention publication count: Na = Np - Nn

(Eq. 6.3a) Reproducibility efficiency: Fr/p = Nr / Np
(Eq. 6.3b) Reproducibility in r-crisis: Nr = Fr/p · Np

(Eq. 6.4a) Attention efficiency: Fa/p = Na / Np
(Eq. 6.4b) Attention in n-crisis: Na = Fa/p · Np

Figure 6.2. Efficiency of publications as a function of decreasing irreproducible publications N_z*. Counts N_X* and efficiencies or fractions F* with the asterisc show the results of various levels of improvement from the baseline state with N_z of irreproducible publications and intermediary states with N_z* decreasing to the standard state with N_z° = 0 x. N_p is the total count of published communications at the current baseline. The reproducibility efficiency is F_r/p=0.15 at the current baseline (red arrow). As the number of irreproducible publications N_z* declines while the number of reproducible publications remains constant at N_r*=N_r, the total number of publications N_p* declines linearly with N_z*. The reproducibility efficiency F_r/p* increases as a hyperbolic function of the declining N_z*. N_z*/N_r* can be understood as the relative inhibitor concentration with a hyperbolic (Michaelis-Menten kinetic) inhibitory effect on the reproducibility efficiency F_r,p*=N_r*/N_p* (Eq. 6.9). The attention efficiency F_a,p* increases as a hyperbolic function of the reduction of N_z* to a maximum F_a,p° = N_a/N_r = 0.33, due to the steady decline of the total count of published communications N_p* as N_z* declines to zero x. The target of optimization is the count N_r,a* or the normalized count F_r,a/p* = N_r,a*/N_p, which contains the quadratic term (N_z/p/N_p)². F_r,a/p* demonstrates the primary importance of cutting down the number or irreproducible publications, which are identified as an inhibitory scientific output and as such not of zero value, but of negative value.

Publications are a currency. Publication metrics is concerned with putting a numerical value on the currency. At a time of currency devaluation, strategies are required to bring the progressive inflation to a halt, whereas the contrary is achieved by elaborating journal impact factors or h-indices which forge a scientific career into a number and into an addicition and craving to increase the number of publications. Even increasing the number N_r of potentially reproducible publications is a lost investment if they get burried under the avalanche of the sheer number of new publications. Advertising for more attention, in turn, is meaningless at a low reproducibility efficiency. Ioannidis et al 2014 suggest that the fraction of irreproducible results published may be as high as 85 %. The corresponding fraction or efficiency F_r/p ≈ 0.15 is even an optimistic estimate in some areas of research. Publication counts such as those in Table 6.1 lead to estimates of an attention efficiency far below the reproducibility efficiency, and a value of 5 % is just taken as an example (F_a/p = 0.05). The r- and n-crisis are not only the two sides of the publication coin, but they have a multiplication effect on the diminishing reproducibility-attention efficiency F_r,a and correspondingly low number N_r,a of reproducible publications which actually receive attention and meaningful interpretation. From Eq. 6.4, N_r,a is calculated as:

(Eq. 6.5) Nr,a = Fa/p · Nr

Substiting Eq. 6.3b for N_r,

(Eq. 6.6) Nr,a = Fr/p·Fa/p·Np = Fr/p · Na

shows that N_r,a is diminished by the product F_r/p·F_a/p. This product is the reproducibility-attention efficiency F_r,a,

(Eq. 6.7) Fr,a = Fr/p·Fa/p

F_r,a equals 0.0075 or 0.75 % of the total publication count when inserting the estimates given above — an enormous inefficiency.

Rearranging Eq. 6.6 and inserting Eq. 6.1a for N_p yields:

(Eq. 6.8) Nr,a = Fr/p · [Fa/p·(Nr+Nz)] 

Eq. 6.8 illustrates that a simple mathematical equation can be as ambiguous as simple words when interpreted without attention to context. It looks paradoxical at first sight, as if an increase of zero-value publications N_z could exert a positive effect on the desirable number N_r,a of reproducible publications that receive attention. The mathematical medium 'equation' gives a meaningless message, if not interpreted properly, as shown in Figure 6.2. N_r,a is strongly controlled by reproducibility efficiency F_r. Therefore, cutting down the count N_z of irreproducible zero-value publications is the top priority.

Consider the paradise of reproducibility when N_z° = 0 x and all else remains unchanged in the static MiP model. Then — at a heavenly reproducibility efficiency of one — F_a/p° = F_a/p/F_r/p = 0.05/0.15, increasing from 0.0075 to 0.33 or 44 times.

, where the count N_a° remains unchanged and identical with N_a in the earthly baseline state, since

(Eq. 6.9) Na° = Fa/p° · Np° = Na/(Np-Nz) · (Np-Nz) = Na

(Eq. 6.8) Fr/p* = Nr*/Np* = 0.15 / (0.15+Nz*/Np)

(Eq. 6.9) Fr/p* = Fr/p(max) / (Fr/p(max) + Nz*/Nr*)

where F_r/p(max) = 1; and F_r/p* = 0.5 at N_z*/N_r*=1.

Workin progress

MitoPedia topics: Preprints, BEC