The Oligopoly that is Academia

Erik Stokstad  writes about a new study recently published in PLOS ONE:

A new study finds that very few scientists—fewer than 1%—manage to publish a paper every year.

But these 150,608 scientists dominate the research journals, having their names on 41% of all papers. Among the most highly cited work, this elite group can be found among the co-authors of 87% of papers.

The authors have analyzed the Elsevier’s Scopus database, looking at at papers published between 1996 and 2011 by 15 million scientists worldwide in many disciplines.

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