Laboratory News new issue: is science publishing too obsessed with citation?
6 Oct 2025
Science publishing has become too focused on achieving citations at the expense of advancing knowledge, claims an industry critic.
Writing in the latest issue of Laboratory News, Damian Pattinson, executive director of not for profit, open access platform eLife warned that the growing dominance of commercial publishers had created “a highly concentrated and fiercely competitive media business”.
“The result is a publishing industry that is incentivised to publish research that is widely cited… over that which is carried out carefully,” he charged in the article which appears on page 13 of the edition.
Open science is also the theme of Dr Rachel Sully’s article on page 18, which examines the historical development of a culture of collaboration in the sector and considers the contemporary impact of the internet and digital era on developments.
Meanwhile, on page 22, PacBio’s Neil Ward argues for greater diversity in genomics and a move away from ‘eurocentric’ datasets in favour of a pangenomic approach.
“Pangenomes represent core genes shared across humanity and variable genes found in certain populations. This fuller picture enables accurate variant interpretation, especially for communities historically left out of genomic research,” states Ward.
Techniques new and underutilised are highlighted by Aston University’s Dr Alice Rothnie and Shimadzu’s Dr Gesa Schad.
On page 31, Schad, co-author of the new imprint of Chromatography for Dummies, calls for a greater appreciation of the benefits of supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), pointing out that improvements have brought better reproducibility and control to the technique.
Rothnie provides insight on page 25 into the pioneering efforts of her team and other academic collaborators in developing a new technique to preserve the lipid environment of cell membrane proteins for improved drug discovery and testing.
Beginning on page 35, our Knowledge section takes a more detailed look at aspects of laboratory practices: Dirk Hackel of Siemens Healthineers offers insights into the priorities of a key component of the lab clientele – the medical profession; while Sytech consultant Neil Buck outlines the benefits of ISO/IEC 17025: 2017 for establishing testing and calibration credibility.
Finally, in the run up to this year’s end of the month show, we focus on Lab innovations 2025, together with the forthcoming Lab Awards, co-hosted by Lab Innovations and Laboratory News. Read about it on page 29.
And together with these features, you can find our Laboratology, Lab Babble and Game Theory columns alongside regular features including our news roundup, Science Allsorts diary, Focal Point and Puzzles pages.
Click here to see the digital version of the latest issue of Laboratory News.
