The way he operates usually goes like this: he has a hypothesis (something that is usually trivial in my opinion). Then he recruits grad or undergrad students to work with him on it. After that, he let his teammates to do all the development work (coding) and experimentation (recruiting subjects and sitting with them in the lab to run the experiments). We needed to recruit human subjects because our work was related to usability of assistive technologies. By the time the data was collected and analyzed, the guy would show up with a vague draft of the paper, in which he has liberally cited his own (and his grad school mentor's) old publications, without knowing a damn thing about what his teammates did. Then we, as his teammates who ran the experiments, fill out the experiment and results sections. He then would write up the conclusion and fill up the rest of the holes. After that, he submits the paper taking the first authorship (because he came up with the hypothesis). That's the way he was able to publish >25 papers during 5 years of grad school (until he got his PhD).
Now that guy is an assistant professor--with ~50 publications--at a well-known University in one of the midwest states (of the US) at the very young age (I think he's just above 30 years old). If you look at his publications, he liberally cites himself and his mentors.
Kudos to him, he knows how to play the game.