Sciences and psychiatry

We're currently witnessing an inflation of the number of scientific journals and of papers published in indexed journals. Indeed, 60% of papers are cited less than twice and so probably are never read. Because the financing of scientific authors is based on their publications, everything encourages them to publish always more, and this regardless of the significance of their results. So emerging techniques to artificially boost the number and the impact of papers appear. We detailed here some of these key techniques: self plagiarism, salami slicing, marketing, famous ghost co-author, early online preview of accepted articles, cartels organization, proliferation of literature reviews, and gradual disappearance of clinical reports. Mapping the landscape of the biomedical research, psychiatry is extremely well-positioned compared to other medical disciplines. Indeed, many journals in psychiatry and neurosciences have impact factors among the highest of medical journals. Unfortunately, psychiatry is not immune to the drifts developed above. Ideas are proposed in this article to get out of this impasse and benefit from a renewed scientific quality assessment. Finally, the question of the humanities is also discussed in relation to the existing publication process. (C) 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.