As an Author and Reviewer: Something Is Not Working

Many people have written about this. I will add my voice as well. About how the current model of publication activity and peer review in academia has gone in the wrong direction and, in many ways, discredited itself. What do we have now?

1.     The scientific value of a researcher is defined by the number of published papers and the number of citations. This leads to an increase in the number of articles and to inflation of the value of a single paper. Researchers often write papers not because they discovered something new and interesting, but because they have to. To report on a grant, to get funding, to be hired, not to be fired, and so on.

Recently on LinkedIn I saw a post by a scientist who said that he would no longer take PhD students and explained why. He had a student who defended his thesis and tried to find a postdoc position but failed, even though he had 5 or 6 publications in good journals, mostly as first author. He was rejected because he was competing with people who had around 20 papers by the end of their PhD. How is this even possible? The professor concluded that he would no longer take students because he did not want to be responsible for young people entering this system.

2.     Many papers are not cited at all. This is confirmed by various bibliometric analyses. For example, in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.09911v1 the authors analyzed the number of uncited papers depending on the time window. They found an interesting trend. If self citations are excluded, more than 20 percent of papers had zero citations according to 2020 data. At the same time, the share of uncited papers decreased from about 60 percent in 1980. This may reflect the growth in the number of journals and authors.

I recently conducted my own bibliometric analysis of papers related to AI and neuroscience from 2015 to 2024. About 12 percent of them had zero citations. 7% had 1 citations and 27% only five or less. Is this normal?

3.     Reviewers are not paid. As a result, it is becoming harder to find reviewers because a proper review requires attention and effort. Either journals spend months searching for reviewers, which slows down the publication cycle, or reviews are written superficially, which leads to lower quality publications.

4.     The emergence of AI has only intensified these problems. Authors use AI to simplify and accelerate writing. Reviewers use AI to speed up writing reviews. AI writes. AI reviews. AI reads. Where will new knowledge come from in the end?

5.     I have already written about paid journals, open access, and issues of quality.

Overall, the situation looks quite bad. I personally see signs of this regularly, even though I am not very actively involved in publishing right now.

Case 1. Me as an author.

I have already written about my case with a paper that has been in a journal for one and a half years. Five months have passed since I resubmitted it after Revise and Resubmit. The journal is good in the field, Journal of Numerical Cognition. I submitted the paper in September 2024. In February 2025 the editor changed. I thought, fine, this takes time. But nothing changed. The editor did not respond. The status did not change. After I wrote that I was going to withdraw the paper, the editor finally replied and said that the paper had somehow been lost, but officially it was still in R&R status, and if I wanted to continue, that was fine. I decided to continue. In September 2025 I resubmitted the revised version. The status still says that the second round review is overdue. No one responds to emails. Recently I saw a call for new editors for this journal. I do not want to accuse anyone. This is just an indicator of systemic overload. Editing a journal is labor intensive and requires time and energy. I am not sure it is well paid. Reviewing is also demanding and not paid at all. I suspect that in my case the original reviewers did not agree to review the second version, and the journal cannot find new ones. Or maybe the paper is lost again. What kind of scientific progress or priority can we talk about if papers stay under review for one and a half years? And I cannot go to a paid journal.

Case 2. Me as a reviewer.

I periodically receive invitations to review. I decided that two or three times a year I would review papers to support the scientific community. But it requires time and effort, and there is no direct return. My position in reviewing is that I try not to reject but to give authors a chance to publish. Time will judge. I try to read carefully and provide substantive comments. Not just vague statements like, I do not like the discussion, add more theory.

I use AI, but only to check language and make my comments clearer, since I am not a native speaker.

Recently I agreed to review a paper slightly outside my main expertise. The paper did not impress me, but I tried to be objective and constructive. I was reviewer number two. The paper was submitted in September. I sent my review in October. In January I was invited to review the revised version by mid February. I read my previous comments, the authors’ responses, and the comments of other reviewers. Honestly, mine were the most detailed and thoughtful. Other comments were things like, restructure this page into paragraphs, adjust this sentence, add this to the table. And the authors responded in the same formal way. Thank you, we have done this. Formally yes. Substantively, very little changed. Minimal, often superficial corrections. You asked to change the section title, we changed one word. You asked to number something, we numbered it.

Did this really make the paper more valuable? I doubt it.

Should this paper be published? Probably. Why? I have no clear answer. I hope it will help someone and maybe be cited, most likely by the authors themselves.

Was it worth the effort I invested? I do not think so.

Now I am sitting and looking at this revised version and asking myself whether I should spend more time reading it again and writing new comments, or simply say, fine, publish it.

I am not saying that peer review is unnecessary. I am saying that the system of peer review and publication incentives needs to change.

What Can Be Done?

I realize this may seem unrealistic at the moment, but I believe we need to:

1.     Abandon evaluation of researchers based primarily on the number of publications and citations.

2.     Introduce paid positions for professional scientific reviewers and consultants within journals. All intellectual labor should be paid.

3.     Eliminate author publication fees, perhaps keeping only optional charges for print color figures.

4.     Finally, I am not fully sure about this, but sometimes I think it might make sense to introduce some upper limit on the number of publications per year. For example, if someone publishes more than 10 papers per year, this should at least raise questions about how deeply they were involved in each one and whether it is physically possible to contribute meaningfully to so many papers. Yes, I know authorship contribution is a separate issue. Maybe instead of imposing a strict numerical limit, we should rethink how contribution is assessed. Contribution statements could become more detailed and meaningful rather than formal. Evaluation systems could focus on a small number of most significant works instead of the total publication count. Raw numbers alone clearly do not reflect intellectual input.

I do not have ready solutions. But pretending that the current system works well seems increasingly unrealistic.