Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds
113 comments
·February 18, 2025LudwigNagasena
> In our opinion, it is difficult to believe that the majority of authors with excessive rates are able to consistently produce large quantities of high quality or groundbreaking research, with their input to each paper being substantial and within norms of what constitutes co-authorship
Huh, I thought providing the general direction and sanity-checking the results is the norm of what constitutes co-authorship for a top professor.
anticensor
My stance is at least one full concept or one data point or else no authorship to that person.
kergonath
Also, the guy who does the writing gets to be an author.
I’ve seen many instances of the new post-doc finishing writing up a former PhD student’s research after the student left and had no interest whatsoever in their former project. It’s a thankless job, with all the pains of doing science without the actual good bits. And yet it is necessary, otherwise some good or valuable research would not get published.
ysofunny
disagree. there's no way it's necessary that people do only the shit bits of science as a career.
then again, there's such a thing as a career as a janitor, clearning shit for life... all jobs are dignified BUT not all jobs make careers
baxtr
What if you’re the guy who is keeping the lab running, ie the guy who is securing the funding?
dekhn
Simply securing funding and being a manager does not qualify for authorship (based on the read on multiple journals submission policy). I don't think this is universally observed or even really policed, so it's fairly common to see people who really did not contribute anything (even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback) listed as the last/corresponding author.
Yoric
I've had a professor who complained he hadn't been made co-author of a paper I wrote, despite the fact that he had not even bothered to read it despite me asking multiple times for his feedback.
I asked him to read it and at least give me _some_ feedback before I submitted an extended version of the paper to a journal. I never did. His name never materialized as co-author.
soperj
Doesn't sound like you're doing any actual science there. What about the guy feeding the scientists or housing them, what about the government for providing roads and sewage? That's like putting Steve Jobs' name on all the patents that Apple produced.
Etheryte
If that's all you do then your work is very valuable, but you have no business being a coauthor on any of the papers. The dean of the university also secures funding for the university, hopefully you can see that that doesn't make them a coauthor.
anticensor
Thank them in the acknowledgements.
leoc
You might as well give Donald Trump coauthorship, then. Actually this could be an excellent idea: if enough scientists kiss his behind in this way Trump might change his mind about supporting large cuts to science funding.
lumost
The issue is that this distorts the perception of what a good researcher does. If the goal is simply to stamp your name on as many papers as possible, and have other papers (perhaps your own) cite those papers…. Then we’re pretty far from incentivizing researchers to do something novel.
null
zipy124
You are correct, in a large number of fields the PI (principal investigator) goes at the end, the big boss of the lab who manages it and often handles funding and the likes. Similar to the C-suite in a company.
scythe
This is a social norm sometimes, but it is very much not sufficient for authorship according to the stated criteria at most journals and ethical standards boards. Usually "authorship" is supposed to mean something like "a substantial contribution to the research content and full approval of the published text". For example, at Medical Physics, an author must:
- Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; AND.
- Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND.
- Given final approval of the version to be published.
mvdtnz
Do you think any one person can provide direction and sanity-check the work of more than 5,000 papers in a year? I don't.
thinkingtoilet
Where did you get the 5000 number?
mvdtnz
From the research paper that the article is discussing.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08989621.2024.2...
> Namely, rates on T2 of up to 212 publications per year, and 5792 new coauthors per year, compared to up to 28.3 publications per year and 173 new coauthors per year on NL. This is despite that the NL list is weighted with more senior researchers, often at the pinnacle of their careers – and hence – likely to have higher rates.
thinkingQueen
My eyes were opened when a field called gamification appeared in the early 2010s. In a few years many gamification researchers had tens of thousands of citations, h-indexes nearing hundred. Well, if you think about it they’re gamers, they’ve been grinding their RPG characters, sniping skills and whatnot for thousands of hours. It’s only natural that these guys and girls figure out how to reach the maximum scientific high score.
Some of the gamification researchers are near the top 500 of that 2% list. Now ask yourself, is gamification something that should make you one of the top 500 scientist in the world? I doubt it, but modern science is a citation game. Nothing else.
layman51
Gamification as a field of study also reminds me a lot of this video[1] of a talk about tips for game developers. It is very interesting because it is from 2016 which is close to the time period you mentioned. I’m pretty sure this video has been shared on Hacker News a bunch.
hansvm
That feels like a certain xkcd [0]. If you can game the totally bullshit rankings then clearly your papers are worth something.
lmm
Thought that was going to be https://xkcd.com/125/. Iteration of the same concept I guess.
xdavidliu
reminds me of the fraudulent Ariely and Gino papers that were exposed a year or two ago, where a very common comment was "they're dishonesty researchers, of course they are going to be dishonest".
tokai
Interestingly King Fahd University, the affiliate of the two authors, has been accused of buying better metrics by getting successful academics to include the institution in their affiliations.
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-12-05/dozens-of...
seydor
note that the 2% list is very large, thus most of the scientists are not just the leading edge superstars but also run of the mill scientists and principal investigators.
The authors focus on the citation inflation in younger scientists but that s unfair (it's only 1000 out of the 20000 in the top 10%). The reality is that older established scientists are much more advantaged because the people of their lab are sought after as collaborators , and they autonatically get an authorship as last authors by virtue of being principal investigators, even if they don't even take a look at the paper. It's thus not strange that they get 35+ authorships per year
fph
Authorship norms in certain fields seem completely broken: a PI shouldn't become an author just for providing money and a lab. Yet unfortunately that's the norm in many fields.
fooker
> a PI shouldn't become an author just for providing money and a lab.
What have the romans ever given us?
fph
I'm not claiming the money and lab are useless, but just don't call them "authors".
When one publishes something with a grant from the NIH or the European Union or the Bill Gates foundation, they acknowledge the grant, they don't add the NIH or Bill Gates as an author. How is this different?
dleeftink
It's interesting how the observers of this preferential attachment effect have since become, well, very preferentially attached [0]. The scaling and diffusion of ideas is rarely (and unfortunately), equally distributed.
[0]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Emergence+of+scaling+in...
mvdtnz
These researchers compared the publish rates of Stanford Top 2% scientists with comparable Nobel laureates and the rate of publishing among the anomalous researchers was ludicrously higher than their peers at the top of their game - "up to 212 publications per year, and 5792 new coauthors per year, compared to up to 28.3 publications per year and 173 new coauthors per year on NL [nobel laureates]".
Do you have any reason to believe the T2 group is composed of "older established scientists" who are "much more advantaged" than the group of Nobel Laureates? To the tune of 10x the number of publications and 33x coauthorships?
seydor
> reason to believe the T2 group is composed of "older established scientists"
there were 1000 academics with < 10 years of career and 19000 with more (in the inflators list). I did not compare their advantage to the nobel scientists but to the younger ones. (Also the nobel laureates are extreme outliers who don't need any more citations to satisfy their ego or funding needs)
johnea
This is pretty much what I came here to post.
Anyone who's even been adjacent to scientific academia knows that the lead author is typically the advisor to the grad student or post doc that actually did the research and wrote the paper.
asdff
In my experience the lead author is always the post doc or grad student who actually did the research and wrote the paper, while the advisor is the last author and they developed the grant to fund both the grad student and post doc. If you collaborate with another lab, their post docs go towards the front behind your name and the advisor goes somewhere at the end. If two people equally wrote a paper they might be 1 and 2 and get an asterisk indicating they are both co first authors. If anyone was involved at all in the work e.g data collection or anyone involved with running an assay they go somewhere in the middle. Perhaps it’s different in other fields
jltsiren
This sounds like a terminological issue. Without further context, I would assume that "lead author" means the last/senior author, not the first/junior author. But I guess that's a life sciences tradition.
"Who actually did the research" is not always an accurate description of the first author. There are plenty of papers, where the last author had already contributed enough to justify authorship before the first author was even hired. You often need to develop the idea and get preliminary results to convince someone to fund the project, before you get the money to hire the first author to work on the idea.
buildbot
Yep, this is what I learned in Grad school as well. First author is the primary person doing the work typically, then their advisor will be the last, and then you work towards the middle. So names in the middle of a paper typically contribute less than either edge!
danielthor
When I was a grad student the only time my PI was listed first on a paper was when he actually did most of the work and I just helped with maths. Otherwise the PI was last and the grad students and post docs doing the research up front. People doing data collection or other ancillary work were mentioned in the acknowledgement section at the end.
When the author count is much higher, like in the thousands in high energy physics, there are different norms like listing the authors alphabetically if the paper summarizes many significant achievements.
In the in-between author order is negotiated.
zevon
This varies greatly by discipline and tradition - sometimes even within the same research groups. For example, some people put the senior person / advisor first, some put this person last, some go by alphabet.
In my experience, there is even more variation in the amount of work expected to be put into a publication by said senior person. To put it mildly. ^^
levocardia
...and imagine how well it would go over for a grad student to say "actually Dr Advisor, you don't meet the criteria for authorship"
throwawaymaths
I've seen someone who desperately wanted their nobel laureate PI on their paper but the professor did not put his name on the paper because it was all their idea (even though it was his grant, he reviewed and ok'd the paper, paper was relevant to his lab, and he really spoke effusively at their thesis defense)
TrackerFF
If you scrutinize the top publishers, I'm sure you'll find some duplicate publications, salami slicing, and other things.
When you're that prolific, the number of publications also become a goal, especially if you're awarded for it.
Maybe not outright academic fraud, but at least publishing pattern that tries to maximize some measure(s).
alberth
Isn't this a well-known issue in the academic and research community where researchers include their friends' names on their published work?
Since researchers are rated and measured by the number of published papers they have, many people game the system by exchanging bylines with their friends ... so that it boosts their total number of papers published.
mrweasel
This was one of the ethical dilemmas we had to go through at university some 20 years ago: "Your professor/supervisor tells you to add them to the list of authors on your paper, do you do it?". There's a whole subset of "issues" here, one where you're more likely to be published with the supervisors name on the paper, another where you're travelling to present your paper, but you're not likely to be granted the budget and adding a professors name will almost ensure an all expenses paid trip.
Low hundreds papers doesn't seem impossible, nor does hundreds of collaborators, but it would heavily depend on your work. We see the same in software. Some people seems unrealistically productive, spawning one successful project after another. I would be interested in knowing for how long they can keep up the pace though. There's also the question of the quality of their work.
userbinator
I wonder how many of these papers are now mostly if not completely AI-generated.
This happened a year ago, and only gained attention because it was bad enough to be noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39391034
amelius
The 10x scientists.
marginalia_nu
To be fair, there has always been extreme outliers in scientific output, like Gauss and Euler.
YossarianFrPrez
I was just thinking about the upper bound on how many papers one could publish in a year earlier this morning. Speaking as someone who spent years in Tech and is now in the middle of a Ph.D. program...
Within the current paradigm, where a post-doc gets hired as a new professor and goes about starting the rough equivalent of a single private sector team, at least in my subfield, 15-25 (non-first author publications) a year is an impressive number. And thus the numbers cited in the supplemental materials, the max being 136 papers a year, is strange, and I am pretty sure the author's points about paper mills etc. hold true.
This is the great thing about the "Contributor Roles Taxonomy" system: it provides a lower level of abstraction and gives credit for who did what (idea generation, coding, writing, reviewing, raising the money, etc.) compared with using "a publication" at the unit of measure. It really solves a lot of problems. [1]
[1] https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Au...
But I'd also like to raise another point. People who wind up in Academia tend to go straight from undergrad to grad school (or spend a year being a lab manager in academia) and so most if not all of the systems we use in software development aren't present. Code review, project timeline estimation, building up a lab-wide codebase of functions to speed up repetitive tasks, 360 degree reviews, lab-wide project management software, an org-chart deeper than two (or in rare cases, three) layers, teams with differentiated responsibilities multiple teams, etc. are not the norm. Every so often I hear of one lab here or there that does one or two of these, not all of them. (Though my experience is limited.)
My point is that if one were to apply all of the modern systems used for coordinating groups of people to produce structured forms of writing, etc., then 100 papers a year sans a breadth-vs.-depth tradeoff might just be doable. But note that this is not "100 papers as year" from an individual, it's "100 papers a year from a mid-sized institution." (Six teams of four getting out 1.5 papers a month equates to 108 papers a year, near the maximum cited above.) Bell Labs' publication / patent rate must have been high!
Granted, what I'm saying is not exactly within the current paradigm of how science is done, and might not be possible in a university setting.
amai
More people need to read the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Fictions
Then this wouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
njarboe
It might be good if the author list had a fraction attached to each author for their contribution share. It could be painful to negotiate this but would help with citation inflation.
https://archive.ph/SnYjB