
More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors - pseudolus
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03371-0
======
antognini
When I was in grad school our department had a meeting every morning where we
could get together to discuss the latest papers which we called "Morning
Coffee" (or also Astro Coffee). These discussions were pretty fruitful and
regularly would inspire new papers.

After writing a new paper based on one of these discussions one of the
professors decided to commemorate the contribution of Morning Coffee to the
paper and added "M. Coffee" as an author. At some point word got out that M.
Coffee was not a real person. From what I understand the journal got _very_
upset. Nevertheless, the original author list still stands:

[https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ...556L..59P/abstra...](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ...556L..59P/abstract)

~~~
gimmeThaBeet
To be fair, being ground up and having boiling water poured on you _isn 't_
completely unlike grad school.

~~~
wallace_f
Having worked on farms, with mechanics, and with grad students, I tend to
believe grad students exaggerate their misery.

While not always true, most grad students I know tend to have relatively good
careers, which they are comparing grad school to. They also tend to be,
relatively speaking, born into good fortune with finances and healthy
families. This is not universally true, of course, but more often the case
than with my coworkers in aforementiones manual labor jobs.

~~~
whorleater
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than
a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like
this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour
week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to
dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake
of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things?
Awesome. Welcome to ~~programming~~ grad school.

from the classic "Programming Sucks" article.

~~~
wallace_f
My programming job was really hard, and a lot harder than grad school in econ.
I personally think domain matters a lot.

------
cortesoft
Who thought it was a good idea to use academic paper authorship as a selection
criteria for university!? There can't be enough high school kids writing
academic papers for it to be that helpful, and certainly encourages this kind
of cheating.

~~~
qrian
They don't have it as a selection criteria. Some context:

South Korean educational system recently had a crackdown on private
academy(hakwon), and in their infinite wisdom, decided to ban every non-public
educational experiences (including things like international olympiad awards)
when applying for the university. Which means that the only thing you can
submit in the application is SAT scores, some public education awards, and
personal essays. Naturally it became the fight of who can write the most
compelling personal essays for the university, and people started to let their
children 'write' academic papers so that they can write stories to claim their
interest and impetus on the application in hopes of impressing the judges.

So it is not a selection criteria but it helped rich & powerful people get an
edge in the university application.

~~~
nemonemo
As a South Korean, I think most of the things described here are not exactly
true, but I might be wrong. Could you provide any source?

AFAIK the history of Korean educational system is the history of Hakwon
superiority in adapting to new rules. A hakwon crackdown was something the gov
did in 80s and failed miserably.

Also there are now very diverse channels for univ entrance. I would think some
channels still allow many of those banned criteria. Maybe they cannot be used
in some prestigious public ones?

~~~
qrian
I am also a Korean and wrote this on top of my head, though I do have to admit
that it has been some time since I've been a student involved in it.

I'm mostly talking about 학종 where you submit 자소서 and 생기부(학생부?), and that
there's been a ban on writing non-public education related experience on the
latter. As for the claim that it being part of the government crackdown an
hakwon,
[here]([https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20100407138500004](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20100407138500004))
is a source I found where they directly mention it. Ctrl+f for 사교육.

------
j7ake
Another great example of Goodhart's law.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
thrower123
Since I'm reading Patrick O'Brian again, I can't help but be reminded of the
practice of false muster - keeping well-connected boys on the books of
warships as midshipmen fraudulently, so as to accrue more service time and
seniority.

Nepotism and zero-sum games just go hand-in-hand.

~~~
tlb
I don't see the connection to zero-sum. You can have nepotism in non-zero-sum
games too. That might describe the traditional practice of handing down a
trade to the next generation, where the bakers and blacksmiths trained their
kids to do it and they took over the business when the old man retired.

Maybe people only complain when the nepotism is in a zero-sum context, where
someone else is losing.

------
qwerty456127
> The practice was probably used to improve the children’s chances of securing
> a university place.

The fact the competition to get into a university is so hard you need to co-
author a scientific paper for this is the problem. Education should be
accessible for everybody.

~~~
smabie
It is. It’s called the library.

~~~
qwerty456127
A library won't issue you a diploma employers/states would recognize.

~~~
barry-cotter
He said education, not certification. Education happens in your head, not in a
database where you have x qualification or not.

------
chmod775
So in one place of the world professors and higher ranking academics are
taking credit for the work of those working under them, in another place
academics are giving credit to children who did not even contribute, and in
certain disciplines (physics for instance, afaik) it is commonplace to just
name everyone working in same the place as you as co-authors, whether they
contributed to that specific paper or not.

Let's not forget about ludicrous amounts of bullshit-papers being produced to
inflate paper counts and citations.

Whoever thinks paper counts and authorship are good metrics for anything at
this point? In fact I believe they are more likely to mislead than be useful.

------
AceJohnny2
Years ago, I implemented a piecewise-linear approximation algorithm based on
this [1] paper. I was amused that the primary author was a high schooler, the
secondary working at Infineon, both in Torrance, CA. The math isn't beyond
high school level, so I figured it was some AP level exercise between the
parent and the child at writing/publishing a paper.

Now I have doubts :)

[1]
[http://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2008/WCECS2008_pp1191-...](http://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2008/WCECS2008_pp1191-1194.pdf)

------
intrnttrll
I guess this is just another flavor of claiming one's kid was a top rower for
their high school crew team. But I guess many parents will use whatever means
then can ( legal or illegal ) to give their children a leg up.

Also, I find it interesting that many schools ( in the US ) will do away with
SAT scores because it is unfair to disadvantaged students. But they will not
get rid of their legacy admissions program which is the most biased criteria
against disadvantaged students. The irony here is that the SAT score was used
to counter bias against disadvantaged students in the first place. It was
viewed as the only "objective" part of the admissions process which could not
be "bought".

My solution to end unfairness in college admissions process is a points based
lottery. Each college publicly sets out a points system for GPA,
extracurricular activity, SAT, athletics, legacy, etc that they will apply to
an applicant and derive a score. Each college publicly sets a "mininum/cutoff"
score. Every applicant with a score above the cutoff will enter an
independently monitored lottery. The lottery will select the freshman class
out of the pool of candidates.

~~~
tasogare
The lottery system is super injust for those that put the work but aren't
admitted. A lot of countries in the developed world don't have the admission
problem because they fund education properly.

~~~
krageon
Generally this problem is solved by having lottery buckets, with higher
average grades giving access to a separate bucket (with more spots relative to
the applicants). This gives people who "put the work" a higher chance to be
admitted.

------
suyash
Similar things occurs for Patent Applications all the time in large
corporations, names of managers is usually present along with the names of
actual inventors.

~~~
my_username_is_
Just because someone is a manager doesn't mean that they can't make a
meaningful contribution to an invention. In my experience, the patentable
ideas can come from anywhere in an organization (and I've seen it from
individual contributor level up to VPs)... but the individual contributor is
always left figuring out the lower-level details of how to get this idea into
production.

~~~
krageon
Ideas are easy, the execution is what's hard. If someone casually thought of a
cold fusion reactor while taking a leak in the morning we would not put them
on a patent for cold fusion reactors either. Where the ideas come from is
immaterial, who fleshes them out is not.

~~~
my_username_is_
I'm not trying to belittle the contributions of individual contributors
(indeed, I'm an IC-level engineer who has worked out the details on many
products that have been patented). The detail work is totally necessary to get
a working product into the market.

But that doesn't mean that the detail work is always what is claimed in the
patent. Sure, sometimes it's a smaller detail-level aspect of a product that
is patented; but other times it's the higher-level system architecture that is
new--so that's what gets patented. It all comes down to what is novel about
the new product, and what is valuable enough that a company wants to pay for
IP protections.

In my experience, engineering managers are almost always engineers themselves,
and tend to still enjoy contributing to some engineering work when given the
chance. Also, sometimes someone is given a "manager" or "director" title as a
promotion simply because they don't have a well-developed technical track for
advancement. "Principal" or "fellow" engineer may be a more fitting title for
their role, but it's not what you'll see on their LinkedIn page. The point is,
just because someone has a title that suggests they're only spending their day
managing people, some can definitely contribute to patentable ideas enough
that they should be listed as an inventor. As mentioned in another comment,
the patent could potentially be invalidated if their contributions rose to the
level of an inventor but they weren't listed on the patent.

------
saagarjha
An interesting spin-off I’ve witnessed here in the United States is putting a
younger sibling’s name on papers and research reports submitted to things like
the Intel STS and the Siemens Competition. It’s hard to show that there’s
evidence of unequal contribution here.

------
rudiv
Anecdotally, prevalent amongst India's elite too.

------
kong75
This phenomenon cannot be avoided as long as papers can help kids go to
universities.

Maybe we can prevent parents from buying papers for their kids (this can be
charged based on evidence more easily). But when the parents themselves are
professors, it is just difficult to determine whether the credits are assigned
appropriately.

Skills that can be accessed and learnt by the majority should be the criteria
for university admission.

------
starpilot
I've heard of this happening in the US as well.

~~~
sithadmin
I've _seen_ this happen in the US among my peers when I was in high school
(mid 2000's). Parents with roles in medical / biomed research were by far the
most prevalent offenders.

~~~
starpilot
Yeah, similar with the (formerly Intel) Regeneron Science Talent Search. Every
kid happens to have a parent who's an eminent researcher of some kind.

~~~
barry-cotter
That would be more or less the expected outcome if there was no cheating of
any kind going on. If you grow up in a household where the dinner table
conversation is about carpentry you’ll pick up a lot of background knowledge
by osmosis and if you show the slightest actual interest most parents are very
happy to share what they’re interested in with their child. Very few people
become researchers without being comparatively obsessed with their field.
Having family in a lab also means your path to working there is a lot easier
because if you screw something up it’ll reflect badly on whoever brought you
in.

I’m sure there are tons of fraudulent papers “written” by teenagers but
they’re certainly not all fraudulent.

------
jerzyt
Vivian Darkbloom is not a exactly a coauthor, but what an exquisitely chosen
name for a character.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita)

------
choonway
If I had my way, I'd have each applicant stripped, x-rayed, confined to an
acoustically isolated faraday cage, and sit down for an examination generated
and marked by an AI system.

I've seen too many enabled people trying to game the system.

~~~
bsder
That still won't help and might make things worse.

By the time a rich student reaches college selection, he has a number of
structural advantages over a poor student.

Let's take the SAT exam in the US, for example. Many poor students take the
SAT effectively cold--the idea that you can prepare for that test and that
paying money to prep is a good idea are simply not in scope. Whereas, a rich
student is simply going to assume that obviously you prep for a test like the
SAT and of course you spend money to do so.

------
m463
When I first saw the headline, I thought this was the common (but
reprehensible) pattern where teachers were taking credit for their student's
ideas.

But this is a bit stranger.

------
b0rsuk
At the same time, a dirty trick and pure genius!

~~~
OnlineGladiator
I'd call it fraud, not genius.

~~~
b0rsuk
Sure it's a fraud, but like something from a comedy movie. Most of the time
frauds are incredibly boring and time-consuming to explain. Especially
financial frauds are often hidden behind layers upon layers of obfuscation.
Now THAT'S what I call planning ahead!

EDIT: ...and I'll gladly pay the karma cost for that reply!

~~~
OnlineGladiator
Your idea of genius seems to be simplicity. I consider genius the ability to
understand things others cannot. I think the question is, how long did the
researchers get away with this fraudulent act compared to bankers who created
the last recession? The ability to hide something for longer from more eyes is
a greater sign of genius than coming up with a trick nobody bothered to
verify.

And of course, the really fucked up part is what the bankers did was legal.

I feel like you're ascribing genius to the equivalent of a parlor trick.

~~~
b0rsuk
I don't remember the exact quote, but simple people can understand when
taught, smarter can learn on their own, smarter still can teach, and a genius
can simplify. Simple things are often hard to make and come from deep
understanding of the system. See also: "If you can't explain something to a
6-year old, you don't really understand it."

You have a point with more eyes, but we still paint a camouflage on a tank,
right?

I think what bankers do is equivalent to piling layers of duct
tape/javascript. It takes a lot of time to go through it and see what it
actually means.

Here, Internal Revenue Service openly admits auditing rich taxpayers is too
hard. [https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-
ea...](https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-
cheaper-to-audit-the-poor) To audit them, you have to spend more time and use
more senior people, which means more money. The US institution can't muster
the same amount of money and specialists as rich people can. And corporations
have a monetary incentive to hire people to do 'tax optimization'.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
> I think what bankers do is equivalent to piling layers of duct
> tape/javascript. It takes a lot of time to go through it and see what it
> actually means.

So basically it's not smart because it's work, and anyone that can find a lazy
shortcut is a genius?

Ultimately what matters is whether or not it worked. The bankers got rich and
faced no jail time, despite being under scrutiny by investors, regulators, and
occasionally the public. The academics committed fraud and hopefully have
their careers and reputations permanently blemished as a result, not to
mention undoing all of the publications they need redacted directly as a
result of the act you are calling "genius."

I really think what you call genius I call laziness, and your celebration of
it represents a lot of what I think is wrong with the world today.

~~~
b0rsuk
And I think I'm amused by the trick. I admire its simplicity and far-
sightedness, that's all. I mean, people have been adding their cats as co-
authors just because a paper couldn't have a single author.

------
dooglius
See also:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard)

I don't see anything wrong with this if the parents want to share credit with
their kids. In any case, there are many cases where authorship is shared with
people who didn't contribute, if universities are taking it at face value
that's on them. Also, who is to say that the kids weren't onvolved in some
way, maybe just as a person to bounce ideas off of.

~~~
notjesse
If the kids made serious contributions, that is one thing. However, that
really doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Nepotism is majorly harmful. If their kids go into academia, they already have
a huge leg up from having academic parents. Let alone if they already have a
strong publishing record which they did not merit. You really harm those who
don’t come from that background, which of course, is how class divide can
become a chasm.

~~~
yabadabadoes
Yes, but I actually think primary authors in title actually being grant
proposal writers and middle managers is far more destructive to academia
itself.

I think it is the norm that a lot of people get primary credit on papers for
doing what managers in every field do every day, and academia is busy
obscuring their own processes as a result.

~~~
topspin
> Yes, but

One fraud doesn't justify the other.

~~~
yabadabadoes
I'm not really looking to justify it. I think fish rots from the head and it's
time to either buckle down to real rules for credit or stop doing multi-author
papers in this fashion.

Hollywood has a credit format.. programmers have a change by change
attribution system.

A serious limit to academic reform is that an institution that fixes its own
rules will have trouble competing for people in many positions by having to be
completely honest about the roles.

~~~
topspin
IOW, if they fail to tolerate fraud they'll have a smaller pool of candidates
because unethical people won't be interested.

This is the sort of thing that's only a problem when your own prerogatives are
misguided. Must academe be merely another institution that must pursue growth
at all costs? If so then is the pedestal it presumes to occupy legitimate?

~~~
yabadabadoes
I think they have very few candidates because of the ethical issues, for
example nearly no one in the US wants to complete an upper degree because they
don't want to be exploited.

To put it differently, poor ethics is possibly a necessity to outcompete other
institutions in what should be a net zero game. Instead the game is negative,
we view academia overall as worse than n years ago because of the
progressively lower ethics, higher administration costs and staff to compete
for the same grants, etc.

------
droithomme
I'm not sure this is always bad, as long is it's obvious it's not serious or
for the purpose of fraud, or if the individual cited actually contributed in
some way. Here's a researcher's dog, whose name was Galadriel Mirkwood, cited
as a co-author:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Dog_co-
author_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Dog_co-
author_controversy)

Who is to say the dog did not contribute to the author's paper and research in
some way she found significant? Likewise with the children. There's tons of
papers where people are cited for making the most minor contribution, like
just suggesting something that reminded the researcher of something else and
that's considered a legitimate practice to acknowledge their inspirational or
otherwise supportive input. And yeah kids can make useful suggestions into
their parents research and should be allowed to be acknowledged when that is
the case.

The dog lady was banned from publication until the angry editor died! Overkill
IMO as I see no fraud there. Fortunately when she was up for tenure she got
it, with the tenure committee finding regarding the dog issue that the
coauthorship was legitimate because "It was a real dog [a frequent lab
visitor] and they said it had done no less research than some other coauthors
had."

In the Korean case the article notes that after an 2018 audit of 82 papers
with child coauthors they were able to determine that about half the children
named had participated in the research. So at least that half were
legitimately credited. The article then notes that currently 549 papers with
child authorship have been reviewed, and only 24 were found to have
unjustified authorship. Only 24 of 549 papers with child authors! That's only
4% of papers with child authors being unjustified. What percentage of papers
without child authors give unjustified credit? Is it more than 4%? Perhaps!
And certainly so for the field of ghostcredited pharmaceutical papers, a known
huge problem. It's possible that papers with child authors are even less
likely to have unjustified authorship than papers in general.

~~~
sgillen
I do think it’s misleading to acknowledge the sorts of contributions children
and dogs might make with co authorship. I do agree that often small
contributions are rewarded with authorship, but really I think these are best
credited in the acknowledgment section of the paper. Otherwise there is not a
good way to distinguish between a substantial contribution and an ethereal
one.

~~~
kradroy
I should have put my grad advisor in the acknowledgements section of my 3
papers instead of as an author...

~~~
n0rbwah
The difference being that it's often expected to put your advisor as a co-
author even if their contribution was anecdotal while it's never expected to
put your kids/pets as co-authors unless maybe there was a very significant
contribution from their part.

