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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and organizing the research as well as challenging the results and strengthening the presentation of the paper. So he was probably on 20-30 papers a year.

In my view this was completely above board, it's the role of a research leader and warrants co-authorship. I don't consider this situation particularly exceptional and I can easily imagine that number going much higher with more organization and focus

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Above board, perhaps.

This way of researching and publish does, OTOH, mean something quite different from science of the past. This isn't applying the method more efficiently. It's applying a different method.

Reading old papers, you know who they were written by. These days, authorship doesn't mean that anymore. It's more like credits in a movie than a signature on a painting.

The nice thing about credits compared to authors is that credits generally have a title/role/position associated with the name. (A grip does a very different job than a costume designer, but with a paper they're all just authors which has a different meaning than say "research director")

For scientific papers, depending on the field, order of listing actually is some indication of role. I think the convention in bio research is 1st author is the primary creator of the experiment and paper while last author is the lab PI.

Per this science.org column, that seems typical across a number of scientific disciplines. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-navigate-authors....

It’s the same in my field (CS: security and privacy). The most senior people tend to be in the end of the list. The first author is typically a student/postdoc who did the technical leadership on the work, and they get the benefit of getting their name out there in the shorthand citation (“AuthorName, S&P ‘23”).

yes this has been, and continues to be the case from my perspective, for at least the last 50 years.

It's certainly not perfect (still a bit coarse, doesn't state what % of the work is done, doesn't state which parts of the paper the author worked on), but CRediT statements are gaining increasing traction in the published literature: https://credit.niso.org/

Don't the credits on a movie imply active participation too? I'd say a closer analogy might be an attendance roll...

I feel like a supervisor who just signed off on things while not “getting his hands dirty” had as much effect on the final paper as craft services does on the final film: not 0, but not really an equal peer.

The supervisor typically has a major hand in choosing a productive research direction. Asking the "right" questions often is what makes research valuable! Also, the supervisor's name is typically last on the paper, and it's clear this is their role.

I'm glad you felt comfortable with that situation, but not all are like that. Sometimes the involvement is very nominal and unnecessary and there can be unintentional side effects that aren't always obvious, in a form of "attribution manipulation." I can think of situations where a researcher is basically "joining" projects whenever possible to attach their name to it in a form of branding. When a junior person comes along with their own original idea, even without the need of the senior person being involved, if the senior person is on the paper that senior person tends to "suck up" undue credit.

I think sometimes the credit is deserved, but there are times when credit for papers tends to gravitate toward certain individuals who are better at managing public perceptions of citations.

Gravity isn't a bad analogy: people with large citation counts tend to accumulate more, and perceived credit gets taken away from other individuals, even if subconsciously. I think it leads to a grossly distorted idea of how credit is distributed.

I suspect this varies a lot but in my experience these large papers with many many researchers involved authorship is very murky in all sorts of ways. People with prominent authorships might not even deserve to be on the paper at all, and people who are lost in the sea might have actually made a significant contribution.

Thanks for putting some realism in the thread. I've been a PhD student and the involvement of the lab head ranged from actually giving some research direction to doing jack shit depending on the paper and the people leading them. It was very obvious once when he green-lighted one of my paper for submission yet wanted to changed half of it when I made an internal presentation about it a week later.

I challenged the thing one time to an intermediate supervisor (who where at least really contributing a bit) and I got bullshit excuses like "he's securing funding", "running the lab"... well at least not for my project since it costed nothing and I came with my own funding. At this point the toilet cleaning lady was contributing more to the paper because of how she allowed me to work in a clean environment.

So I'm not surprised by Japan being over-represented like mentioned in the article. My lab explicit policy was "quantity over quality" written in a presentation given to new student. I know have a mental, logarithmic curve of contributions from authors: first made 90% of the work, second 9% and the following authors share the last 1%.

I agree with you. PIs that have their name in so many articles are actually gaming the system.

Nature and Science journals now require author contributions. Administration, fund acquisition, etc. are typically no longer valid to claim authorship. Cell is an exception and does allow this.

So in my experience they simply force other coauthors to give them credit for study design when they did none.

I was in a similar group a decade ago. At the time, I found it impressive and efficient, but looking back now, I find much of those papers not to amount to much. I wonder what your experience is: were those 30 papers per year good science overall?

I think they followed a bell curve. They were all legitimate science - I don't pretend that this was a world leading lab, but it was a decent one and we mostly published in the field's main few journals. I don't believe the volume had any negative impact on the quality, if anything it made it better because metrics being what they are we had good grant money coming in and got good people and equipment.

And as the sibling pointed out, all of us students had great opportunities to write and submit papers and conferences. I had peers in grad school with very conservative supervisors that didn't want to publish very much (I can think of one prof in particular who was undoubtedly a very good researcher and infrequenty published very good papers). This can be a disservice to students who don't get the same experience, and it's an argument for why publication count is a good metric (even though it's obviously flawed)

What field?

Most research amounts to nothing. It’s why they call it research. But we can’t get the 1% of breakthroughs without the 4% of hits, 93% meh’s, and 2% frauds. Not to mention that much published research is mistaken.

Above all, it’s hard (at least in the sciences). So anyone willing to follow the scientific method and package their results into a whitepaper is doing good science. The scientific method is ultimately the only requirement.

The fact that most research, dare I say by definition, has little value is true. The fact that most published papers have no value is also true.

It is also true that some (published) research may go unnoticed and be discovered or rediscovered (much of science is the rediscovery of ideas that were once speculative and then became valuable because of a change in methods, technology, paradigm) later on. It is a rare occurrence, though, which does not justify the hours, money, energy spent on endeavors that everyone knows are, to the greater community of scientists, researchers, and citizens, meaningless and worthless.

But part of the currency used in science is the number of papers, place of publication, citations received and overall impact on the field of the papers, and the deluge of worthless articles and research is a direct effect of the metrics chosen to evaluate scientists.

> The fact that most published papers have no value is also true.

Is that true though? If I'm about to embark on a bit of extensive research, the first bit of that research would be to see if someone else has already done it. If they have, then there's value to me in not having to spend time/money in repeating what someone else has already done. Or it could show me where other things can be tried instead of just repeating. If we know 999 ways on how not to build a light bulb, we can scratch one more method off by seeing what other people have published.

How is that not considered value?

You are referring to the publication of "negative results", which are of course informative, although rarely published due to a bias shown by journal editors and scientists themselves towards "positive results", that is results supporting the hypothesis tested. Negative results are published, yes, but in the context of popular or highly contested hypotheses or models. That's valuable research.

Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers testing hypotheses nobody is interested about, theoretical work that looks like more abstract art than science, p-hacking, work that starts with corrupted, unreliable, badly collected data, and so on. Work that has no value other than that provided to the authors by the fact that they have produced a piece of "scientific currency".

I must say that at least 1/3 of my conspicuous scientific output was of very limited value. Unfortunately, I cannot go back in time and spend my valuable time and energy on more valuable research.

> Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers testing hypotheses nobody is interested about

I broadly agree with you, but this point is probably mistaken in an illuminating way. The path to breakthrough science sometimes passes through uninteresting work. Few scientists were interested in natural selection before Darwin and his contemporary. There are many other examples.

We are talking about different things. We know about speculative research (which I referred to in my first comments), which gets discovered later on because of new methods, technologies, changes of paradigm. It rarely happens, and it makes a "splash" because it is good narrative and it is unlikely. But it happened, no doubt.

I am talking about, just to offer an example, the vast majority of research that is published (please take this as a gross simplification) in journals with impact factors that start with a zero, theoretical work that re-invents linear regression, work based on data collected like a stream collects rain during a storm, that is everything gets in unfiltered.

The justification for thousands and thousands of worthless articles published worldwide every year cannot be, "maybe among them there is the next natural selection-like theory of evolution that will revolutionize our understanding of the world". But unfortunately, left unchecked, scientific production has increased tremendously in volume, and I am quite confident that increase did not lead to an increase in "good science".

Ah. That makes sense. Thank you for the thoughtful point.

The pressure to publish tends to lead to many smaller papers, instead of, say, a longer monograph that collates it. Indeed, multiple publications are often made using parts of the same data-set (given how much effort and cost it is to run a study, there is often an incentive to get more data than less, particularly in the clinical and psychological sciences).

It is unfortunate in many ways (not all).

Not OP but a thing to consider: the training the junior members gain from the process is valuable too. Those 30 papers may not amount to much, but if even one of the primary authors ends up with Nobel-caliber work once in their career, was that worth it?

Are those junior members learning to do Nobel-caliber work or are they learning to pad their CVs by publishing tons of low-impact papers?

Therein lies the rub. It depends a lot on the person. There are tons of tenured professors who kick back and don't do much, and then there are those who can't help but keep working hard. I think the hope is that you will luck into getting some of the latter in your group, so even if training the others might end up a waste, some will end up successful. Kind of like the VC model.

Are those the only two options?

> if even one of the primary authors ends up with Nobel-caliber work once in their career, was that worth it?

It would seem likely that the answer to that is yes, and that none got the prize and it wasn’t worth it.

I’m not sure what to compare against. Of course most research papers don’t amount to much, but are the ones produced by big groups with only a little hands-on work by the professors much worse on average, I wonder?

Indeed not surprising at all. Some of our facility people (like sequencing or biobanking) insist that you add them as coauthor if the facility did some work for you

So I still don't understand why these professors don't have their name second after the student author. It's still prestigious to guiding some of the best minds but also very honest, maybe even have a special symbol to indicate it as such in parenthesis.

I am sure it can be different everywhere, but at least my advisor in grad school was great about making sure the students were ahead of him in the list. The student(s) who were primarily responsible were first and then he would be on it after.

Out of curiosity I checked and he has 161 publications on Google Scholar. Of the publications with multiple authors he is first author on only 7 of them. And then 7 are single author.

This is the standard protocol

In the fields of physics I'm familiar with the group leader is usually listed last on papers. They get credit wherever they are in the author list, while being first or second author carries more cachet for students and postdocs who are trying to establish their careers.

Reading and providing comments on a paper is secretarial work and not valuable respected scientific work. Any undergrad could do it. There are even companies in some countries that do it well.

You have to contribute substantively to the actual research.

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