I'm an academic, and papers are the currency of my trade. A significant part of my professional effort goes into trying to put out publications high in value as well as number. Metrics like the h-index grade this enterprise, attempting to include both quality and quantity in their definitions.
Let's talk about quantity. Especially in a world where detail and nuance are submerged by a tsunami of information, and few people have the time to judge the essential quality of a work (which is difficult - if not impossible - to reduce to a number), quantity has acquired a quality all its own. Considerations of quantity are very important for those treading the academic path - for graduate students under pressure for landing good postdoctoral positions, for postdocs trying to find faculty jobs, for junior faculty trying to obtain tenure, or associates aiming for promotion to full professorship. For faculty evaluation and advancement, department heads, deans and provosts are increasingly taking decisions that are 'data-driven': meaning quantity is important.
But once a member of the faculty has reached full professorship, and is not under existential pressures to publish a lot, the question arises if (s)he should take a more considered approach to publishing. Should such professors publish even more, not limiting themselves to topics that are fashionable, or projects that would necessarily lead to invited talks at conferences? This kind of work could open up new areas, enable hitherto unsuspected applications, or introduce disruptive new paradigms. Or should they limit themselves to publishing only work that is obviously relevant, seriously aimed at the big impact factor journals, and certainly not in the niche or on the fringe? This would ensure all work is well-motivated, the funding has obvious justification, and investigations avoid scientific cul-de-sacs.
For guidance, we can consider some well known scientists and their publication records. Peter Higgs, with the eponymous boson, famously admitted he would not be considered productive enough to hold a faculty position today; he published no more than ten papers after the groundbreaking work for which he was awarded the Nobel prize. Grigory Perelman, who famously solved the Riemann conjecture, and Andrew Wiles who famously proved Fermat's last theorem, have low h-indices, of around 7 and 17 respectively (mine is 24, just for comparison). Going back a little further, Feynman had about 70 papers in all, Onsager about the same; but many of them ended up being classics. Going back even further, Gauss was notorious for not publishing until he had polished his work to a high shine. "Few," was his motto,"But ripe."
On the other hand, there have been many prolific authors such as Cauchy (800 papers and five textbooks), Faraday (about 500 papers), and Euler (more than 800 papers). An article in Nature discusses hyperprolific authors, i.e. those who publish a paper every five days. A number of factors enabling such high academic metabolic rates have been identified in the write-up, including, but not limited to: leading long-range collaborations, working in multiple research areas, and sleeping fewer hours per day.
Of course, this is a personal choice; I have colleagues who have flourished using either approach. For myself I have relaxed a little bit in favor of publishing more niche. I am not intelligent or far-seeing enough to accurately decide ahead of time which of my work, if any, will be the most relevant. And I am curious to see if anyone will pick up, often many years later, a thread that I had initially started. Of course, I try not to publish incrementally, or with what I have heard referred to as the MPU (Minimal Publishable Unit). But if I can complete something that I think represents an advance in knowledge worth communicating, I will definitely try to get it published.
There have been occasions on which a paper was initially ignored by the physics community but eventually turned out to be phenomenally important: a sleeping beauty (see Table 1 for "Beauty coefficients" and "awakening years"). I will probably never write a paper like that - but hope springs eternal!
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