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Comment by pdevr | Hacker News Reader

List of publications by Baselga: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4840569-Baselga-Arti...

It's surprising how many authors all of these papers have. It makes it difficult to allocate credit.

Not saying this is the case here, but I'm sure that if someone was very strategic about it, they could get their names in a lot of high quality papers without having to do much work.

In fact, I think that people who focus more on the political aspect of their careers tend to be more successful than people who actually do the innovative work.

"In fact, I think that people who focus more on the political aspect of their careers tend to be more successful than people who actually do the useful research work."

That's unfortunately the case also outside research. You can have a very good career if you only focus on politics and nothing else.

How much of the successful 'politics' would you say is actually sycophancy?

Flattering is not enough. You need to also actively undermine your competitors to be successful at politics.

If you want to get promoted it really helps to figure out a way to make your boss look good.

Isn't that the first law in the book '48 Laws of Power'?

That's the case in all organizations - academic, government, business, military, charity, etc.

You can get your foot in the door by being competent. If you want to rise within any organization, you either have to know someone or you have to be great at office politics.

People naively think the hardest or best workers move up the ladder. No, you want the hardest and best workers working. You want them in the trenches. You want people with contacts or people you like promoted.

Whether we like it or not, success in life has a lot more to do with relationships than competence or merit. Who you know, who your family knows and who your friends knows matters far more than what you know.

The number of authors doesn't seem unusual there, and a high number of authors doesn't have to indicate anything problematic.

There are many valid reasons why author lists can get rather large on scientific papers. Anything that is even a bit interdisciplinary will usually multiply the authors because you need collaborators with the right expertise and can't do everything yourself.

I occasionally get listed as a co-author on papers where I feel my contribution has been very minimal. At first I objected, but apparently it is a thing in Academia to list absolutely everybody who had any involvement at all with the research.

Maybe this isn't what you meant, but it's not a thing in all fields in academia. Pure math for example is generally pretty careful about authorship, and so is cs theory, for the same reasons. Not coincidentally both fields use alphabetical author order instead of contributional.

For biomedical research this is really not a large number of authors. Some very large clinical trials often have scores of authors, which isn't particularly surprising given that they cost $100s millions and take place across dozens of sites/hospitals/countries.

Generally most of the authors don’t get much credit at all, at least in the biomedical space. The first author or co-first authors and the last author. Everyone else is more of a hanger on.

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