Over Publication of research articles is the true cause of the loss of innovation in the United States. Four Factors.

In our imperfect information model, the presence of a potentially small number of low-skilled researchers imposes a negative externality on high-skilled scholars, which imposes overpublication as a costly signaling strategy for the latter. In equilibrium, the analysis reveals (1) systematic underinvestment in exploratory research by high-skilled scholars (compared to the first-best perfect information setting), (2) systematic overinvestment in publishing papers (incremental advances), (3) decreased efficiency of resource-based incentives for research, as some of these incentives result in increased publishing, (4) decreased efficiency of reward-based incentives for research, since in the separating equilibrium with output limit, how much time high-skilled scholars dedicate to writing papers depends on the maximum publication output of the low-skilled scholars, and not on the relative reward associated to the two intellectual productions.