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Comment by LudwigNagasena | Hacker News Reader

> In our opinion, it is difficult to believe that the majority of authors with excessive rates are able to consistently produce large quantities of high quality or groundbreaking research, with their input to each paper being substantial and within norms of what constitutes co-authorship

Huh, I thought providing the general direction and sanity-checking the results is the norm of what constitutes co-authorship for a top professor.

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My stance is at least one full concept or one data point or else no authorship to that person.

What if you’re the guy who is keeping the lab running, ie the guy who is securing the funding?

Simply securing funding and being a manager does not qualify for authorship (based on the read on multiple journals submission policy). I don't think this is universally observed or even really policed, so it's fairly common to see people who really did not contribute anything (even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback) listed as the last/corresponding author.

Which should be treated as misconduct.

Folks who do this should be shunned by their peers and driven out of academia. It's exploitative and coercive.

Unfortunately people like that tend to run academia.

Not as exploitative as the anonymous reviewer report that asked to add 15 additional papers to our lit review ... all by the same author.

I’ve had that happen in notes from an editor telling me that in addition to addressing reviewer comments I should cite a whole bunch of their completely unrelated articles when submitting a revision.

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.

I doubt it's any comfort but there are so many people who find this story and many like it to be disgraceful. The unfortunate thing is that they clearly aren't the people who run journals or conference committees.

ICMJE guidelines are frequently cited by other publishers, with the caveat that it depends based on the field. (Which makes sense. A "substantial contribution" to the LIGO collaboration might be much less direct than one in ML or field geology.)

> 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...

> even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback

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.

Yes. For one of my hosted interns, I was invited to the weekly meeting (the intern was "working for" another team) and asked for insight, before being added to the paper. I had expected to be listed simply for being the intern host but they didn't agree. I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, I think if a PI runs a lab, brings in all the funding for a grad student, and doesn't really get deeply involved, they should still be listed because they provided the environment in which the research could be done, but I've been told this is a controversial opinion.

I'm not sure I understand what it means to be the "intern host" in this context or why that matters for authorship, if the intern was working for another team, and that team was the one working on 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.

An intern host: I worked in bigtech. i got permission to secure a summer intern (paid by my cost center). I wrote a job description, interviewed candidates, and hired the best one. the intern came to the company, I found a desk for them, I met with them weekly for status reports, and daily to chat about various stuff. In this case, due to my role and its demands, I could not spend time working on interesting research, so instead, I arranged for the intern to work daily with another team that was doing relevant research. I was invited to, and attended, periodic status meetings, occasionally contributing what little knowledge I had (but absolutely no coding or ML engineering). I read the final paper (did not write any of it) and approved and I received authorship credit (as did the intern's PhD advisor, who also did not really contribute much technical stuff, but provided lab space, and a stimulating environment in which to work and learn).

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.

Gotcha.

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.

Surely the dean and the provost deserve to be listed then too?

In general the last author (in CS) is the one managing. I'm sure many a PhD student can tell you that their advisors, who are on every paper they write, have at times provided little to no input (potentially providing negative value, at least with respect to the research topic at hand).

Securing the funding often means writing a research plan that is interesting and convincing enough to be selected for funding in a competitive review process (80–97% rejection rate). The plan usually represents a substantial intellectual contribution that serves as the foundation for derived papers. As long as the people who join the project later don't freeze the planner out of the paper writing process, they'll usually meet all authorship criteria.

Doesn't sound like you're doing any actual science there. What about the guy feeding the scientists or housing them, what about the government for providing roads and sewage? That's like putting Steve Jobs' name on all the patents that Apple produced.

Did they? (Put his name in all of Apples patents?)

Steve Jobs has 1114 patents. Apple has 16240.

so yes.

I've worked at at least one company where the managers would routinely name themselves as "inventors" on patent applications, where their subordinates were the ones actually doing the "inventing."

I've worked at one, too.

That felt... disheartening.

But also the best motivator to stop selling your brain to heartless corps and go build your own stuff

The true incubators are the ones that you where inside all too long

Building my own stuff: definitely.

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 :)

"Securing the funding" is much closer to the work than "providing roads and sewage".

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.

You might as well give Donald Trump coauthorship, then. Actually this could be an excellent idea: if enough scientists kiss his behind in this way Trump might change his mind about supporting large cuts to science funding.

Trump has that "you want to be the last person to leave the room" type though, as that's as much as he cares to remember if even.

If that's all you do then your work is very valuable, but you have no business being a coauthor on any of the papers. The dean of the university also secures funding for the university, hopefully you can see that that doesn't make them a coauthor.

I've had a professor who complained he hadn't been made co-author of a paper I wrote, despite the fact that he had not even bothered to read it despite me asking multiple times for his feedback.

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.

sounds fair, fuck that guy

Thank them in the acknowledgements.

Also, the guy who does the writing gets to be an author.

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.

disagree. there's no way it's necessary that people do only the shit bits of science as a career.

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

> the shit bits of science as a career

I think op was referring to the hard work and effort that's involved.

> there's no way it's necessary that people do only the shit bits of science as a career.

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.

This is a social norm sometimes, but it is very much not sufficient for authorship according to the stated criteria at most journals and ethical standards boards. Usually "authorship" is supposed to mean something like "a substantial contribution to the research content and full approval of the published text". For example, at Medical Physics, an author must:

- 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.

The issue is that this distorts the perception of what a good researcher does. If the goal is simply to stamp your name on as many papers as possible, and have other papers (perhaps your own) cite those papers…. Then we’re pretty far from incentivizing researchers to do something novel.

Do you think any one person can provide direction and sanity-check the work of more than 5,000 papers in a year? I don't.

Where did you get the 5000 number?

From the research paper that the article is discussing.

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.

That is 212 papers, not 5000. 5000 is the number of new authors of those 200 papers.

Looks like the number is off, but is their point any different with 212 papers? I still think that it would be impossible to give any meaningful support to 212 papers in a year. That's a new paper every 1.72 days.

Those 200 papers correspond to 4 papers per week, or more than 1 paper every other day for the whole year, weekends and holidays included. Coauthored with thousands of people they'd never published with before. It's a rather incredible rate.

And that's before you have to try and actually write for grant funding, perform any actual substantial research (that took more than 1.5 days), serve as an editor or reviewer to do any of that "peer reviewed" part, go to a conference on your subject, deal with students, teach, or really anything else with academia.

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?

Yeah, you're listing some of the reasons I left academia.

im not a scientist but usually browse arXiv preprints, and it was interesting to see a feature that calls out how much similar text to past papers a submission has!

Did not realize that arXiv had that type of feature. May not actually be well known to many others on HN or arXiv. Thanks for noting the feature was even available.

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've no idea and I cannot find any example now, If I recall correctly it was something along the lines of a custom -arXiv note: this paper has 56% text similarity with this other submission.

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

You are correct, in a large number of fields the PI (principal investigator) goes at the end, the big boss of the lab who manages it and often handles funding and the likes. Similar to the C-suite in a company.

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