Researchers are producing huge quantities of research papers. In 2022, there were over 5 millions research papers published. This trend is expected to keep growing. It is in part due to the fact that school rankings such as the Financial Times Business School Rankings takes into considerations criteria related to the number of articles published by academic institutions. Also, many schools require a certain number of publications for teachers to become tenured. This has several impacts, such as reducing the quality of overall research and making it more difficult for researchers to be up to date on current research.

We applied the guiding principles from growing a Bonsai Tree to research work and advocating de-growth. Would quality of papers change if you fertilize research differently? What happens if you change ranking methdologies by shaping and evaluating reasearch world differently? Would the quality of papers change if you decrease quantity of papers published by pruning?