The road to High Impact • “Dare challenge your boundaries”

To publish well or to publish often is a question that continues to divide the scientific community. While many scholars see frequent publications as the path to academic success, others identify a risk of drowning real excellence in a tsunami of scientific mediocrity. One who has his opinion clear is Ola Söderberg, Professor of Pharmaceutical cell biology who in August had his tenth article accepted in a Nature journal.

“Today, we operate in a system where junior researchers are expected to publish a specific number of articles in order to merit. In my opinion, this is a sure way to prevent young talents from tackling the big, complex questions. Instead, we must cultivate an environment where we encourage the next generation of experts from the start to raise the bar to heights they can be proud of once they reach them, states Ola Söderberg at his laboratory in Uppsala's Biomedical Center.

A look in the rearview mirror shows that similar reasoning is expressed by many leading researchers. Already in the 1960s, the British physicist Derek de Solla Price warned of a future "doomsday of science" when the almost exponential growth of academics and articles would lead to a world populated by more scientists than people. In 2016, Daniel Sarewitz, Professor at Arizona State University, urged the scientific community to dare to publish fewer works in order not to bury good research behind layers of substandard ditto.

“When our group recently presented Sloppymerase, an artificial enzyme that visualizes DNA damage, in Nature Communications, it was the result of seven years of intensive research. From the very start, we realized the full extent of the work that lay ahead, but by formulating goals that challenge boundaries and putting in the time required – it’s comparable with writing a longer, complex novel instead of several short stories – you increase the chance to achieve truly solid results and getting them through the eye of a needle to high-impact journals, Ola Söderberg reasons.

Professor Söderberg lives as he teaches: When he in 2016 decided to swim 100 meter freestyle in less than 56 seconds, countless sessions in the pool awaited. When Ola was finally ready, he reached the finish line in 55.08 seconds. An accomplishment that set both a new Swedish record and a world’s best in the 50+ age group. We leave it to Chat GPT to define how the same driving force manifests itself in a scientific CV: “A single article in a Nature journal is often considered career-defining, making ten publications an outstanding achievement that reflects a solid history of groundbreaking work.”

“Having your article accepted in a high-impact journal adds a lot of value, starting already at the review phase, when the field’s leading experts provide input on your material, which offers important guidance to sharpen your final version. Once your results are published, they reach both further and more relevant target groups, making these aspects so important that they should be highlighted already in undergraduate education before being fully implemented in our postgraduate education.”

However, not everyone is quite as convinced about limiting quantities in favor of quality. In a study of the reach and citations of 48,000 scientists’ output, Ulf Sandström and Peter van den Besselar calculate that 6 percent of the most productive researchers have published more than half of the highest percentage of cited articles. In Motivated Academic, Dawid Hanak, Professor at Teesside University, suggests that the more you write, the more ideas you generate and learn to express along the way to increased visibility for your work.

“As in every academic context, full consensus will never be reached, but if we turn to Uppsala University's Mission, Goals and Strategies, they explicitly state that we should "develop research excellence" which should be followed up with "proportion of publications among the 10 percent most frequently cited". This is an important goal, but it requires that we - not least when promoting and recruiting - place greater emphasis on actual content and not just count the number of articles,” states Ola Söderberg.

Another indicator of scientific relevance and impact is Scopus, the world's largest reference database for peer-reviewed literature, which assigns each individual researcher an H-index based on publications and citations – where 40 or higher characterizes "outstanding scientists who are likely to be found only at the top universities". Here we find a number of researchers at the Faculty of Pharmacy, among them Per Artursson with an H-index of 96, Hans Lennernäs (#71) Mats Karlsson (#65), Christian Benedict (#55), Christel Bergström (#50), Lena Friberg (#49) and not least Ola Söderberg who with 117 publications reaches an H-index of 43 but also a remarkably high 77 citations per published article.

“The fact that our group in 2017 joined Uppsala University's Faculty of Pharmacy has undoubtedly added important value to our creative process. It is an environment that stimulates interest-driven research, and later this fall we hope to present our next work in which we develop a technique to map protein interactions that we initially published in Nature Methods in 2006 – which for me confirms that every solid work opens up a new horizon of possibilities to explore.”

Text: Magnus Alsne, photo: Mikael Wallerstedt