Surge in number of 'productive' authors concerns scientists

Some coworkers in other university have to publish "2 papers" per year, but if a paper has N authors, it counts as 1/N. This discourage adding authors for free, but does not solve the problem of garbage papers.

["2" is a lot. Perhaps I'm misremembering and they only have to publish "1".]

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, but a great way to trigger fraud investigations"

This is definitely fraud. No one can legitimately publish a paper every 5 days. But on the bright side, it's mainly fraud against the university administrators who are too lazy to develop better metrics than "number of papers published" to evaluate the faculty. These fake papers appear in journals no one pays attention to, and are only ever cited by the fraudsters and their conspirators.

The few exceptions are American or European authors who manage to cheat their way into prestigious institutions. Those frauds can go on for quite some time and create their own little sub-fields.

What is the authorship practice in physics and why is it so different?

> They excluded physics authors, who tend to publish large numbers of papers because authorship practices in this field differ from those of other subjects.

This actually might be good for science. I have seen people paralyzed by grammar and formatting, and are otherwise excellent at data generation.

If LLMs smooth over the basic format and language and let people focus on the plots, that could be quite useful.