Placeholder papers

To get a lot of citations, a paper does not need to make a significant contribution to the field. Some papers are just placeholders. They are cited by default whenever someone wants to make a certain general claim, thus accumulating many citations. Most often, these placeholder papers simply reiterate what everyone in the field already knows; they contain no empirical results and no new insights. They do not even conduct literature reviews—a genre that I consider important—serving merely as position papers.

As these papers are essentially empty, there is no real need to cite them. However, there is a convention in scientific writing to support any non-trivial claim with a reference. These papers happen to be the most convenient for some general claims. Also, it does not hurt that the placeholder papers are published in the most prestigious journals, so mentioning them might seem to add weight to a citing paper.

For example, in my field, there is a paper that is cited whenever someone wants to mention computational social science. It was published 15 years ago but continues to accumulate citations as if nothing has changed in the field. I just checked all the citations it received this year: all of them are purely ritualistic. They do not refer to the actual content of the paper. The typical reference is something like this: «Machine learning has become a powerful tool in numerous domains [reference to the paper].» I do not think this claim requires references. And if one wants to add it, it would be nice to cite a comprehensive literature review on the topic. However, that is not what is happening. People cite placeholder papers instead.

One might argue that the ability to effectively summarise existing knowledge and ideas is still a skill, and that this skill deserves recognition. That science is not only about empirical results and even new ideas but also about communication. I do agree. I think it is worth re-telling an existing idea if it was not well communicated in the first instance. It might also be worth re-telling an existing idea to a different audience. I feel uneasy when a disciplinary journal publishes something that was discovered in other fields for quite some time. But I see value in that.

The problem with placeholder papers is that they are not the result of a fair competition for the best presentation of ideas to a certain audience. They appear when one of the most prestigious journals decides to invite famous authors to write a paper. There might still be peer reviews, but these papers skip the most challenging step in top journals: desk rejection. A mere mortal would never be able to overcome this barrier if they tried to send exactly the same text using a conventional publication route. I have also heard from reviewers that their opinion is more often ignored with such papers.

I know that this might sound like bickering. One of my colleagues was always telling me that it is useless to spend time on such complains. That we are not in a position to change anything. Why not spend our energy elsewhere where we could make a real positive change? No one makes friends with such claims. No one advances their career. And it is not a revelation for most scientists. I think it is wise advice. But I have one disagreement with this colleague.

They think that discussing these issues with early career researchers is detrimental because it demotivates and confuses them. Yet, in my experience, true demotivation arises when researchers sense something is amiss but observe unanimous silence about it. Then they start to doubt themselves, and doubt the whole system. However, when the flaws of academia are openly recognised, and when early career researchers do not feel isolated in their observations, it becomes significantly easier for them to focus on their work and on positive sides of academic life.