Distinguished VCU engineering professor urges changes in academic publishing practices

By Lorraine Cichowski and Mohamed Gad-el-Hak

RICHMOND, Va. – In a provocative opinion piece in the March issue of Physics Today, distinguished engineering professor Dr. Mohamed Gad-el-Hak charges that the "publish-or-perish" principle at U.S. universities has deteriorated over the past 15 years into a serious bean-counting syndrome that threatens the integrity of academic publishing.

Gad-el-Hak, the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor of Biomedical Engineering and chair of mechanical engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University, blames the proliferation of journals published by for-profit publishers and an increasing emphasis by some academic institutions in faculty tenure and promotion decisions on quantity of articles and books published rather than the impact of those publications. He notes that his specialty area of fluid mechanics has at least 250 journals published in English.

"As important as I like to think fluid mechanics is, it is a mere branch of continuum mechanics, itself a branch of mechanics, which is part of classical physics, and so on," he writes. "Who can keep up with 250 journals?"

As a result, he says, the peer-review process for journals has suffered because good referees cannot keep up with the number of papers they are asked to review, and an increasing amount of mediocre work is making it through the system.  Some articles remain without a single citation, and perhaps even a single reader, five or more years after publication.

Gad-el-Hak recommends that resumes submitted to promotion and tenure committees be limited to listing only 5-10 significant publications, researchers decline to review or serve as editors for what they suspect to be mediocre journals, and journals publish their impact factor.

Gad-el-Hak is available to discuss the state of academic publishing. Please call (804) 828-3576 or e-mail gadelhak@vcu.edu. A copy of the opinion piece is available by fax or by e-mail in PDF format by calling (804) 828-1231.