I believe that the problem is much broader than individuals "cheating" the peer review system. Rather, why has the number of manuscripts increased so dramatically? Many bemoan the increasing quantity and decreasing quality of papers these days, and yet few are willing to discuss the root cause - competition for jobs/grants. So long as there are too many individuals vying for too few jobs/research dollars, the incentive will be to publish often, even if the quality of the work is low (i.e., satisfy the search committees and reviewers who value quantity over quality).
There are several ways to address this issue (and I doubt that my list is exhaustive): 1) Increase the number of jobs/grants for ecologists; 2) Decrease the number of ecologist we train so as not to exceed the number of jobs/grants that are available; or 3) Change the way we evaluate candidates to better reflect the quality of the work they have done, rather then just reward output per se. In my opinion, option #1 is largely out of the hands of researchers; moreover, if the amount of funding did increase, there is always the risk that the number of ecologist we train would as well, leading to no net gain. I have seen certain individuals refrain from taking students, fulfilling the second option above, but getting a whole community of ecologists to do it seems problematic (who would decide how many students each researcher can train?). The third option seems the most realistic, but will require a shift in the way we evaluate research productivity. Moreover, it brings with it risks as well - counting pubs is, at the very least, objective, whereas who is to evaluate the quality of the work done by an applicant? I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this issue ... Candan Soykan [email protected]
