Publication, publication and yet more publication
Quality must not be forgotten in the quest for quantity of peer reviewed articles. Journals with a high impact factor must be prioritised.
We must all publish – and preferably more and more. We are actually quite good at it; all graphs show the right, upward direction. Last year we published 4.2 peer reviewed articles per VIP and this year the goal is to publish 4.4 articles per VIP. That is all fine and good. We do very well when benchmarking with other institutions and Denmark does very well in comparison with comparable countries.
The focus on quantity does make me wonder a bit, though. On a daily basis we do not really talk much about what is published or how ground-breaking it is, but only about how many publications a PhD student, for example, has managed to produce; has he or she written three publications?
It is obviously easier to measure quality than quantity and we do need to be measured. I do not advocate for doing away with quantitative indicators but would like to encourage that we do not only look at the number of publications but also their impact.
The new strategy has incorporated the goal that we must also publish in journals with a high impact factor. This does not necessarily mean that all publications have to be in journals with a high impact factor, but that some articles should be able to be published here. Such articles would to a great extent help improve our international profile and increase our impact in a world in which there has never before been published so much.
How, then, do we publish high impact articles or in journals with a high impact factor (yet another quantitative scale)? First of all, we are already really good at it and I suppose everyone tries to get their articles in the best ranking journals. However, I do believe that we can achieve even more by focusing a bit less on the number of articles.
In addition, under the auspices of the new flagships, it would be an obvious goal to identify future challenges where important research initiatives in the area of agriculture can make their mark in framework-setting reviews or horizon-scanning articles. Last but not least it is important to identify and nurture areas in which we can emphasize basic research within the flagships.