This Correspondence is in response to a Commentary by Peter Lawrence in Nature on 20 March, 2003. Click here to read this article.

Sir – I strongly support the views of Peter A. Lawrence in his Commentary about the politics of publication (Nature 422, 259–261) and congratulate Nature for publishing this piece.

As Lawrence says, the assessment of science is, regrettably, moving towards an “audit society”, in which the fact of having published in high-impact journals is seen as more important than the content of the papers themselves.

There are two further problems that arise from this assessment of individuals through the locations of their publications. First, only a minority of submissions get sent out for review in high-profile journals. As a regular reviewer for Nature, I find that submissions often contain some 'bold claim' about the extraordinary novelty of the results presented. These bold claims are designed to get the paper into the review process. In my experience, reviewers often find that the work in the manuscript is good science and quite interesting, but that the bold claim typically cannot be justified by the data that have been presented. The authors then dilute or remove the bold claim, with the result that a good, quite interesting manuscript is published, but is no better than many simultaneously being published in specialized journals. The difference is that the Nature submission began with hyperbole and overselling, the traces of which have vanished from the final version. There is a danger that authors are rewarded for a fundamentally dishonest approach.

Second, the review process has no power to screen for false authorship. Often, a large laboratory is likely to get one or more papers in high-impact journals, and it is very easy for the group leader to insert the name of a favoured postdoc who 'needs' a publication for some career goal into the list of authors, notwithstanding the minor contribution that the individual made to the work. The young scientist's CV is enhanced, and the rewards follow, not just for the young scientist, but also sometimes for the group leader.