Is it necessary to have a variety of publishers in the list of my own publications?

Question

I am a junior researcher and physician at a German university hospital. I am part of a funding program with regular workshops on grant applications, scientific writing, etc.

More recently, we discussed grant applications at the workshops. All of us had to hand in a sample application or an application we recently sent. When discussing my application, the course instructor / lecturer said the following things (translated from German):

Your application is good but very factual based. It is not very creative. A major point of concern is your top 10 publication list. The majority of your publications is from a single publisher - which could be interpreted as a lack of diversity.

Do you agree on this? I checked my top 10 list, which is a list of my own most relevant publications for the grant application, and it included: 3 publications in Springer, 2 in BMC and 5 in MDPI journals. Usually, my boss would decide where to submit. Should I be concerned? As we are in Germany, most publications in Springer and BMC are made open access free of charge for us by Project DEAL, and I simply do not have the money for some Elsevier / Taylor & Francis open access journals etc...

Answer 1

It may be that the concern was not so much that half the publications come from a particular publisher, but the specific publisher involved. There are some people who do not have a great opinion of MDPI journals - see the fourth paragraph of their wikipedia article.

I do not know enough about MDPI to be able to speculate as to the validity of such an opinion.

Answer 2

Frankly, the comment seems bizarre. But since it seems to be just advice on writing grants, without a supervisory component, you can safely ignore it.

You may have limited influence over where those papers were published, and possibly no control, given that your PI decides. It would be a mistake to write with the goal of maximizing the number of publishers cited rather than the appropriate papers no matter where they appear (if reputable).

The instructor may believe (wrongly IMO) that papers get prestige or validity from the journal they are published in, rather than the other way about. Journals have prestige because they publish high quality papers. If they publish junk, they lose prestige.

Had they criticized a particular journal for lack of quality, it would make some sense, but "more is better" seems, to repeat, bizarre.

I doubt that people evaluating a grant proposal have the "number of journals cited" as a measure of quality, though some journals are recognized to be low quality.

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Edited to add that some MDPI journals are controversial as noted by other writers here, and MDPI itself has been criticized as a publisher.

Answer 3

Your course instructor probably reiterates something she was taught herself by somebody else. In fact, I have heard the recommendation to avoid publishing too large a fraction of one's publications in the same journal before, uttered by different people. This recommendation was not focussed on the publisher, though, but on the journal. So yes, there is a chance that a proposal you write is assessed by somebody who concurs with your course instructor, and you may want to take this into account for future manuscript submissions.

The reasoning behind this was usually to avoid the impression that there is some personal connection to a specific journal or editor which improves the chances that a manuscript is accepted for publication there.