The Anna Karenina principle: A way of thinking about success in science

Lutz Bornmann () and Werner Marx

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2012, vol. 63, issue 10, 2037-2051

Abstract: The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy's (1875–1877/2001) novel Anna Karenina is: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Here, Tolstoy means that for a family to be happy, several key aspects must be given (e.g., good health of all family members, acceptable financial security, and mutual affection). If there is a deficiency in any one or more of these key aspects, the family will be unhappy. In this article, we introduce the Anna Karenina principle as a way of thinking about success in science in three central areas in (modern) science: (a) peer review of research grant proposals and manuscripts (money and journal space as scarce resources), (b) citation of publications (reception as a scarce resource), and (c) new scientific discoveries (recognition as a scarce resource). If resources are scarce at the highly competitive research front (journal space, funds, reception, and recognition), there can be success only when several key prerequisites for the allocation of the resources are fulfilled. If any one of these prerequisites is not fulfilled, the grant proposal, manuscript submission, the published paper, or the discovery will not be successful.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22661

Related works:
Journal Article: The Anna Karenina principle: A way of thinking about success in science (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:63:y:2012:i:10:p:2037-2051

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().