Why Stellar Research Remains Under the Radar

The pressure to publish may be averting researchers from pursuing out-of-the-box, groundbreaking science

Illustration by Deborah Lee

In 1985, Oxford University diabetes researcher David Matthews published a study in the journal Diabetologia about a computerized mathematical model that could determine blood glucose and insulin levels. For more than two decades, the paper attracted little attention. But something changed in 2008, and in the 11 years since, the paper has been cited more than a thousand times each year, adding up to just under 20,000 citations. That makes Matthews’ study one of the most highly-cited pieces of research published in 1985.

Matthews’ study is what is known as a “sleeping beauty,” a paper that awakens from its dormant state of attracting little to no attention to suddenly become a major body of work. Though the number of such papers was on the increase in medical literature until 1998, they have since remained at a constant level, according to a recent analysis of 230 million citations from seven million papers published between 1980 and 2017. The trend holds true when the authors account for the fact that scholarly literature has exploded in the last few decades, with the global scientific output roughly doubling every nine years.

This is likely due to the fact that scholarly literature has become easier to find due to the rise of open access policies, which require journals to make papers free to read, according to Ton van Raan, a bibliometrician at Leiden University in the Netherlands who co-authored the analysis. But it could also be that researchers are conducting less of the sort of risky, out-of-the-box science that can create such sleeping beauty papers, due to increasing academic pressures to publish more and more research.

“The huge pressure to publish means many researchers often cut corners and fail to do a proper systematic review before starting their research,” says Adrian Barnett, a statistician and metascience researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved with the new analysis.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but rather because its…