Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds
chemistryworld.com
chemistryworld.com
Huh, I thought providing the general direction and sanity-checking the results is the norm of what constitutes co-authorship for a top professor.
I’ve seen many instances of the new post-doc finishing writing up a former PhD student’s research after the student left and had no interest whatsoever in their former project. It’s a thankless job, with all the pains of doing science without the actual good bits. And yet it is necessary, otherwise some good or valuable research would not get published.
then again, there's such a thing as a career as a janitor, clearning shit for life... all jobs are dignified BUT not all jobs make careers
Right, they don’t do only that, they also have their own projects. Also, even if it’s not very pleasant, it’s good to have more papers early in a career. It helps landing the next position.
I think op was referring to the hard work and effort that's involved.
Depending on the specific nature of the feedback, someone who does something describable as this could be providing anywhere from 0 to 99% of the scientific insight provided by the paper.
Regardless, if you showed up to a weekly meeting, and provided insight into the data provided, then it does sound like you deserve authorship.
I would have been OK with a simple credit in the paper (an acknowledgement) but after the fact I realized I had been invited to meetings specifically to justify my co-authorship.
I would agree that you were invited specifically to justify giving you co-authorship. As evidenced by the existence of our conversation right now, exactly what level of involvement justifies co-authorship is fuzzy at the margins; whatever their personal views, they were probably doing you a favor by moving your involvement from the fuzzy zone into the hard-to-argue-with zone. Even if everyone directly involved in the paper thinks "being an intern host justifies authorship" the presence of some senior institutional figure who disagrees could cause problems for you.
Folks who do this should be shunned by their peers and driven out of academia. It's exploitative and coercive.
But I have also been a reviewer in a situation where a supposed broad review article for a preeminent journal completely ignores citing a massive amount of relevant prior work (except, conveniently, the authors’ own work, which in many cases was cited over more relevant and important earlier work), including a large number of my own articles.
> Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
> Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
> Final approval of the version to be published; AND
> Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
So you are right. The corresponding author who got funding for the postdoc who designed the experiment for the graduate student that supervised undergradutes and wrote the paper would have a pretty tenuous commection to authorship.
But good luck to everyone else in that chain publishing without them.
Ref: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-respo...
I asked him to read it and at least give me _some_ feedback before I submitted an extended version of the paper to a journal. I never did. His name never materialized as co-author.
In most sciences, to actually secure the funding, you need to argue for why the problem is important, why the team has a shot at solving it, and what possible approaches look promising. Then you need to actually advise the team in supporting the work.
That felt... disheartening.
Doing all the admin work, all the capital raising, etc. needed to build my own stuff: I suspect that this would kill me.
Joining a nice startup: been there, done that... will do it again :)
- Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; AND.
- Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND.
- Given final approval of the version to be published.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08989621.2024.2...
> Namely, rates on T2 of up to 212 publications per year, and 5792 new coauthors per year, compared to up to 28.3 publications per year and 173 new coauthors per year on NL. This is despite that the NL list is weighted with more senior researchers, often at the pinnacle of their careers – and hence – likely to have higher rates.
Writing for grant funding alone has already been a big complaint about how long and difficult it can be with limited success rates in a lot of fields. Time constraints of being a reviewer and how much of your own academic time you have to give up has been a major complaint. They're all time consuming. And then a paper / 1.5 days.
Really, from having been in academia for a little while, putting out something well thought out once a month seems rather fast.
Edit: It would interesting as follow-on research to look at the specifics of suspicious cases. What kinds of methods are being used to "game the system." What kinds of exploits are being employed? Are there common patterns among the suspicious crowd?
Why publish 1x when you can publish the same 10x? Copy and paste data from other people's work? "Lorem ipsum" papers that nobody reads? Extensive citation circles where they all cite each other 50x? Graphs / tables that just look like gibberish data? Very obvious LLM use that has many of the common hallmarks and speaking patterns?
Do you happen to know what they're using for the "similarity?" Might be it's own research subject in and of itself. just identifying similarity and paraphrasing substitution that's fundamentally the same paper. We changed a bunch of words with a paraphrasing tool. Used only as example cause it's the top search result for "paraphrasing text": https://quillbot.com/paraphrasing-tool They're apparently very easily available.
I checked the similar one, and was the same authors but different titles, gussued it was a case of a draft not getting a revision properly, but didnt double check for the author email beyond the name (it could also be someone impersonating the real authors with fake credentials, i guess)
but i think it was a revision!
if i find it again ill comment back here
Some of the gamification researchers are near the top 500 of that 2% list. Now ask yourself, is gamification something that should make you one of the top 500 scientist in the world? I doubt it, but modern science is a citation game. Nothing else.
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-12-05/dozens-of...
The authors focus on the citation inflation in younger scientists but that s unfair (it's only 1000 out of the 20000 in the top 10%). The reality is that older established scientists are much more advantaged because the people of their lab are sought after as collaborators , and they autonatically get an authorship as last authors by virtue of being principal investigators, even if they don't even take a look at the paper. It's thus not strange that they get 35+ authorships per year
Do you have any reason to believe the T2 group is composed of "older established scientists" who are "much more advantaged" than the group of Nobel Laureates? To the tune of 10x the number of publications and 33x coauthorships?
there were 1000 academics with < 10 years of career and 19000 with more (in the inflators list). I did not compare their advantage to the nobel scientists but to the younger ones. (Also the nobel laureates are extreme outliers who don't need any more citations to satisfy their ego or funding needs)
What have the romans ever given us?
When one publishes something with a grant from the NIH or the European Union or the Bill Gates foundation, they acknowledge the grant, they don't add the NIH or Bill Gates as an author. How is this different?
[0]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Emergence+of+scaling+in...
Anyone who's even been adjacent to scientific academia knows that the lead author is typically the advisor to the grad student or post doc that actually did the research and wrote the paper.
"Who actually did the research" is not always an accurate description of the first author. There are plenty of papers, where the last author had already contributed enough to justify authorship before the first author was even hired. You often need to develop the idea and get preliminary results to convince someone to fund the project, before you get the money to hire the first author to work on the idea.
When the author count is much higher, like in the thousands in high energy physics, there are different norms like listing the authors alphabetically if the paper summarizes many significant achievements.
In the in-between author order is negotiated.
In my experience, there is even more variation in the amount of work expected to be put into a publication by said senior person. To put it mildly. ^^
When you're that prolific, the number of publications also become a goal, especially if you're awarded for it.
Maybe not outright academic fraud, but at least publishing pattern that tries to maximize some measure(s).
Just for example, physics papers produced by large international collaborations (e.g. every single paper from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN) routinely have hundreds of authors (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567): everyone who has made substantial contributions to the design and operation of the facility is listed, as is everyone on the data analysis teams. (My understanding is that people in those specific fields all recognize that "number of citations" is a mostly meaningless number for those involved, and other metrics for productivity are well-known in those communities and routinely used.) I hear that some genomics papers have broken 1000 authors as well.
I could easily imagine that the high end of observed publication numbers and coauthor counts would be dominated by those giant collaborations, even though there is absolutely no attempt to mislead anyone in the process. Can anyone tell from this article to what degree its conclusions might be influenced by this factor?
Since researchers are rated and measured by the number of published papers they have, many people game the system by exchanging bylines with their friends ... so that it boosts their total number of papers published.
Low hundreds papers doesn't seem impossible, nor does hundreds of collaborators, but it would heavily depend on your work. We see the same in software. Some people seems unrealistically productive, spawning one successful project after another. I would be interested in knowing for how long they can keep up the pace though. There's also the question of the quality of their work.
This happened a year ago, and only gained attention because it was bad enough to be noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39391034
Within the current paradigm, where a post-doc gets hired as a new professor and goes about starting the rough equivalent of a single private sector team, at least in my subfield, 15-25 (non-first author publications) a year is an impressive number. And thus the numbers cited in the supplemental materials, the max being 136 papers a year, is strange, and I am pretty sure the author's points about paper mills etc. hold true.
This is the great thing about the "Contributor Roles Taxonomy" system: it provides a lower level of abstraction and gives credit for who did what (idea generation, coding, writing, reviewing, raising the money, etc.) compared with using "a publication" at the unit of measure. It really solves a lot of problems. [1]
[1] https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Au...
But I'd also like to raise another point. People who wind up in Academia tend to go straight from undergrad to grad school (or spend a year being a lab manager in academia) and so most if not all of the systems we use in software development aren't present. Code review, project timeline estimation, building up a lab-wide codebase of functions to speed up repetitive tasks, 360 degree reviews, lab-wide project management software, an org-chart deeper than two (or in rare cases, three) layers, teams with differentiated responsibilities multiple teams, etc. are not the norm. Every so often I hear of one lab here or there that does one or two of these, not all of them. (Though my experience is limited.)
My point is that if one were to apply all of the modern systems used for coordinating groups of people to produce structured forms of writing, etc., then 100 papers a year sans a breadth-vs.-depth tradeoff might just be doable. But note that this is not "100 papers as year" from an individual, it's "100 papers a year from a mid-sized institution." (Six teams of four getting out 1.5 papers a month equates to 108 papers a year, near the maximum cited above.) Bell Labs' publication / patent rate must have been high!
Granted, what I'm saying is not exactly within the current paradigm of how science is done, and might not be possible in a university setting.
Then this wouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
"Similarly, paper mills – organizations that produce fabricated or low-quality manuscripts for profit – often rely on inflated co-authorship networks to boost the metrics of paying researchers..."
The article references this paper on predatory journals as the source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2?...
According to this paper more than 75% of the authors published in these journals originate in India and Africa (mostly Nigeria).
Or some 50/50 split. Obviously we need new studies. But the f they don’t replicate, what’s the point?
As an example, take this rather recent ICLR submission that is egregiously plagiarized[0] (I mean attempts to hide the plagiarism are minimal to nonexistent). Clicking on the authors you can view their profiles and you'll find that most authors have several thousand citations and one north of 25k[1]!!!! They also have an i-10 of 400, which is highly abnormal for that citation level while the last author has an i-10 of 126 with only 7.3k citations.
The problem I see here is that there's lots of suspicious activity and clear evidence of fraud, yet little to no action is taken. If anything, it seems we mostly ignore it. The ICLR submission is a bit odd too, since decisions and comments are public, most of the time this happens behind closed doors and we don't observe the evidence. As far as I'm aware, no one is making network graphs to track fraudulent authors. I think we want to sweep it under the rug because at the end of the day our system relies heavily upon trust. Unless we strongly incentivize reproduction we require high trust and we're afraid to acknowledge fraud in the community because we believe it will make more distrust science. But I think in reality, the reluctance to pursue fraud and the reluctance to have high clarity creates more distrust. The truth is that this system poorly scales even before we incorporate the reverse (bureaucratic) incentives.
I think we lost sight of the goals of research and publishing. Publishing exists to facilitate communication among our peers. We publish in venues for two reasons: to improve/error check works and to facilitate social networks. Publish or perish is detrimental as well as the push for highly subjective measures like novelty. I strongly advocate for returning to the old paradigm, where the conditions for publication are: are there any major errors, is there plagiarism, and does the work sufficiently provide evidence for the experimental hypothesis (note: I intentionally do not say "prove".). This system accepts the reality that we cannot sufficiently judge significance. Breakthroughs by definition come from research areas that are under studied. Frequently from directions that had previously been rejected. Unfortunately, this is becoming more common due to the speed in which researchers must publish and exacerbated by the rise in thresholds to get a work published. Many ideas are abandoned not due to evidence that they will not yield progress, but that the belief to achieve "sufficient" evidence would require too much time. While tenure should "resolve" this, it ignores the fact that a tenured professor still has students that must publish as well as they've been working in a very different way for years. And old habits are hard to break.
I think we need to take a hard long look at our system and I suspect we could do so much more if we rebuilt the structure.
[0] https://openreview.net/forum?id=cIKQp84vqN
[1] https://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?user=D-TS1fAAAAAJ
My boss insisted that we include other team members on our patent apps, even if they were not involved, as a way of improving morale. (It backfired. No one on the team who eas uninvolved wanted a patent they didnt earn. No one who earned the rigjt to be named on the patent app felt it was right to include non-inventors.)
(I'm in academia)
Just want to say that I love Issac Asimov and he wrote a lot of high quality work and people even say that he’s a graphomaniac with a writing compulsion.
I think people’s work should be judged by the output quality not some sort of speed limiting judgment.
There is a difference between being prolific and what those people put out. At least one order of magnitude. Isaac Asimov did not write 80 novels each year.
Some of the people mentioned in the research are coauthoring ~200 paper a year.
I don't think Isaac would be in the same league as those mentioned in this paper.