What behaviors (desirable or not) are encouraged by an incentive system based on publication throughput?

Question

What (researcher's) behaviors (desirable or not) are encouraged by an incentive system based on publication throughput?

Considering this as a research problem, I propose to list all the potential strategies that a researcher can apply to "game" various academic systems and to increase one's recognition by such systems, starting in this question with academic systems which evaluation is based on the number of academic publications. Later objectives could be to design mechanisms to detect and measure tendencies to follow such strategies, and to identify other set of strategies potentially used to maximize one's number of citations, or more interestingly one's h-index and i10-index, but those later objectives are not part of the discussion here.

To make the discussion cleaner, I propose to remove all moral judgments about the strategies, and to merely list all that could be applied by an academic sociopath in order to maximize his/her success. The goal is not to encourage such behaviors (obviously?), nor to criticize institutions which embrace some of those strategies, but rather to identify clearly the consequences (desirable or not) of an incentive system based on publication throughput.

Feel free to add other strategies in your own answer below, or to edit my own answer below, collaborative Q/A style.

Answer 1

This is a terrible question, because it presumes that publications are the goal of science, as opposed to an indicator of actual meaningful intellectual contribution.

Therefore, I will provide a solution that proves the metrics are meaningless per se:

1. Generate a sequence of N meaningless papers using Sci-Gen.
2. Have each of the meaningless papers cite K of the other meaningless papers in the sequence.
3. Identify a set of crap journals that do not perform meaningful peer review with the aid of Beall's list.
4. Publish the meaningless papers in series in the crap journals, thereby obtaining an i10-index of N and an H-index of K (assuming N>=K>=10).

If self-citations are excluded, then enlist (or fake) a colleague to do the same and cite each other's meaningless papers rather than one's own. If Journal Impact Factor matters, then sequence the papers over three years.

Citation metrics are the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

Answer 2

If Academia was a game, and if the winning rule was to maximize one's number of publications (which I don't think it is, but which the administrators of some institutions seem to believe), I think that the following strategies would make sense:

• Focus on Research :: Abandon all attempts to personal life (and good teaching) and dedicate your life to research. You might manage to produce more publications than fellow researchers who have a personal life and/or spend a large proportion of their time teaching, but never more than fellow researchers applying a combination of the following strategies.
• Focus on low hanging fruits :: Choose a finite set of conferences. While attending or when the proceedings are published, review it quickly to mark publications overlapping with your sphere of expertise. Assign a limited time-length (e.g. two days or two weeks) to each problem, and see if you can produce some quick results on it. Spend more time on it ONLY if you have had results within the allotted time, otherwise move to the next topic. Aim to delegate the writing of the results to a junior colleague or to a student in order to optimize your time. Notice how attacking a "long-standing open problem" will NOT help you to maximize your publication throughput.
• Minimal Publishable Unit :: adjust the content of a submission to the minimum required, so that to maximize the number of publications. NEVER join two conference papers into a single journal publication, even when they largely overlap, as this would reduce your number of journal publications. Aim to publish the journal version of each conference article as soon as possible so that, if the results of your next conference publication overlaps with the last, the journal version is reviewed BEFORE the second conference publication is submitted.
• Self-Plagiarism :: when a partial result of independent interest can be used in various more important results, avoid creating an easy to reference lemma in one publication and to refer to this lemma in the others, but rather reproduce its proof in each of the parallel submissions, in order to make each submission look more technical and lengthy. Aim to submit the various results in parallel so that to further justify this multiplication with the excuse to make each submission independent from the other. Aim to write minor variants of the result in each submission in order to further confuse the situation.
• Publishing Clusters :: collaborate with a finite set of x colleagues of your field who have had in recent years at least y yearly publications per year at a given level agreed upon. Agree on a number z (less than y) of research themes per year that each of the members of the cluster is to propose to the whole cluster, to research them and describe their results on their own, and to submit it to the whole cluster for proof-reading. Aim to increase by a term of roughly zx publications (minus potential rejections) your number of publications per year. Aim to participate in at least two distinct clusters in order to confuse things, and optimally to y distinct clusters, contributing exactly one publication to each cluster. As your career advances, rotate clusters to further confuse things, at the cost of a more complex management. Participate in various clusters at various levels of publications to further confuse things.
• Pyramidal Scheme :: Maximize the number of doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculties in your laboratory or research group. Minimize your involvement in each project, but insure co-authorship of each report/publication. Focus on acquiring funding to attract and recruit more people. Pay attention to your people's need in term of future careers only when they are relevant to attracting more people and to maximizing your output. When you reach the maximal size at one level, apply to the next level.
• Falsify experimental results :: Producing fake results, presented in a difficult to reproduce fashion, in a field where experiments are costly and lengthy, will give you an edge over fellow researchers who labor to gather the funds to perform those same experiments, and make them waste time trying to reproduce your experiments. Aim to recruit junior researchers and/or students and to push them in non-explicit ways (or at least not in writing, only orally) to fake their results so that you can put the blame back on them if/when discovered.

Answer 3

There is one behavior that is encouraged: vociferously advocate to change the mainstream publishing model to cater the needs of authors to publish more stuff instead of providing the readership with quality, curated scientific content. Subscription-base journals, editorial rejection and scrupulous peer review have to be made obsolete because they only prevent scholars form lengthening their publication list.