Environmental Studies Faculty and Staff Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2017
Keywords
impact factor, research evaluation, researcher productivity
Abstract
Governmental spending on science is usually justified by claims that the resulting research will yield benefits for the sponsoring nation. I present policy-analytic and ethnographic research—based on 30 hour-long interviews—of the Mexican ecological research community to explore the structural influence of publication incentives on research content and its relevance to national needs. During a financial crisis in the 1980s, Mexico created a national publication incentive system, the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, to identify and reward scientists producing the most and the most-cited research as defined by dominant international scientific norms at the time. The system has increased productivity but in the process has undermined that country’s ability to benefit from its ecological research by surrendering priority setting to the editorial preferences of journals that are linguistically and financially unavailable to potential domestic users. The Mexican experience has implications for institutions worldwide that utilize quantitative productivity measures in researcher evaluation.
Publication Title
Science and Public Policy
Required Publisher's Statement
Science and Public Policy, scx054, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scx054
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press.
Recommended Citation
Neff, Mark W. (2017) “Publication incentives undermine the utility of science: Ecological research in Mexico.” Science and Public Policy. doi:10.1093/scipol/scx054.
Subjects - Topical (LCSH)
Ecology--Research--Political aspects--Mexico
Subjects - Names (LCNAF)
Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (Mexico)
Geographic Coverage
Mexico
Genre/Form
articles
Type
Text
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Language
English
Format
application/pdf
Comments
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.