> There's no shame in it: academics have grad students, who at least sometimes get a mention in the acknowledgements.

In what field????? In fields I'm familiar, whoever does the research (i.e. the grad student or the postdoc) is the first author, helpers are co-authors and the PI i.e. the main academic who leads the lab is the last author. In what field PI is the first author and grad students "sometimes get acknowledgement"? That sounds like academic fraud.