• Pyr@lemmy.ca
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    6 hours ago

    I can see why journals would not want to publish boring papers in the days of paper magazines and limited space but why would they not be published digitally nowadays? Limited by people able to review them?

    • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      No reason, I suppose. In my opinion it seems to just be a holdover from the previous systems of publishing. The prestige of a journal is ranked based on how often it gets cited (or in other words, how influential the papers are within the journal). Publishing insignificant/uninteresting data would lower a journal’s average citation count, which would make it seem less prestigious than other journals. Hence journals are incentivized to only publish interesting data. It’s a shitty system that everyone knows is shitty but nobody has a good solution for how to fix it