At the recent International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, researchers at Yale University, New Haven, Conn., presented data on 18,411 original papers published in 2006 from 144 journals in the cardiovascular discipline.
They found that the median number of citations was six; 15.0% of papers were never cited; and 33.3% had only one to five citations in the following 5 years. It was no surprise that the impact factor of the journal predicted subsequent citations: That’s probably one of the reasons why those journals have high impact factors. So what do the authors conclude? They state that their data suggest "substantial waste in some combination of the funding, pursuit, publication or dissemination of cardiovascular science."
An interesting thought but flawed. Sure, the number of publications has expanded, but so what? The cardiovascular medicine community is now very large. No one presupposes that all published papers are high quality, useful, or impactful. Sometimes a paper is redundant and poorly constructed, and may not have been subjected to rigorous peer review. But "diamonds in the rough" do exist, and that is why I sometimes read journals with rather paltry impact factors. New ideas or kernels of new ideas can often be found there. The same goes for abstracts at meetings.
Rather than express concern, we should argue that our field is filled with ideas, that the way forward is often incremental and that limiting publications would potentially damage progress. If any "solution" is needed, it will come from quality peer review and economics. After all, a journal with a minuscule impact factor is not likely to sustain itself on subscriptions and advertising dollars.
So, are we really publishing too much in cardiovascular medicine? Dr. Mort Kern, chief of cardiology at the University of California, Irvine, used to say that "every paper can find a home," but the publication process can be time consuming and difficult. Let’s continue to publish and keep the conversation going.
Dr. Paul Hauptman is professor of internal medicine and assistant dean of clinical-translational research at Saint Louis University and director of heart failure at Saint Louis University Hospital. He serves as an associate editor for Circulation: Heart Failure and blogs while staring out his office window at the Arch.