As a former researcher with multiple high-impact publications I can 100% confirm it:
- when I was a researcher in Italy for an unknown lab, all of our articles were generally very scrutinized and went through years of reviews before publication
- when I worked in Michal Graetzel[1]'s laboratory things get published much more easily on more higher impact journals with less scrutiny. Not only most of the publications didn't really add much to the scientific knowledge, but they didn't even have the very high standards required when I was in Italy
Why is this bad? You get more funding the more you publish...So labs that publish easier due to the names involved get much more money...which they can use to publish even more and get even more money...which they can use to publish even more...
There's excellent scientists anywhere, really. But funding, fame and politics are extremely asymmetric in academia.
- when I was a researcher in Italy for an unknown lab, all of our articles were generally very scrutinized and went through years of reviews before publication
- when I worked in Michal Graetzel[1]'s laboratory things get published much more easily on more higher impact journals with less scrutiny. Not only most of the publications didn't really add much to the scientific knowledge, but they didn't even have the very high standards required when I was in Italy
Why is this bad? You get more funding the more you publish...So labs that publish easier due to the names involved get much more money...which they can use to publish even more and get even more money...which they can use to publish even more...
There's excellent scientists anywhere, really. But funding, fame and politics are extremely asymmetric in academia.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gr%C3%A4tzel