
Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days - chriskanan
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06185-8
======
tinkerteller
This is a great study and gives insights in to what's wrong with research
today. As the study has uncovered the causes:

\- mentorship of very many young researchers

\- leadership of a research team

\- becoming full professors, department chairs

\- leadership roles in large centres

As the paper states: _at the peak of their productivity, some cardiologists
publish 10 to 80 times more papers in one year compared with their average
annual productivity when they were 35–42 years old. There was also often a
sharp decrease after passing the chair to a successor._

In other words, people with checkbooks gets their names engraved on work that
is being done by _others_. Their author metrics like h-index and citation
counts would shoot up and the get credit for scholarly publications even if
they have played little or no part.

This is extremely sad. These people in leadership roles should be avoiding
taking credit to scholarly work that is not theirs.

As the article says, requirements for authorship are the "Vancouver criteria"
established in 1988. These specify that authors must do all of four things to
qualify: play a part in designing or conducting experiments or processing
results; help to write or revise the manuscript; approve the published
version; and take responsibility for the article’s contents.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors does not count
supervision, mentoring or obtaining funding as sufficient for authorship.
However as credit hungry folks becomes leaders they circumvent all and every
ethical line to get their names on everybody else's work whoes paychecks and
careers depend on their whims.

~~~
watwut
It is more complicated then that with mentors and leaders. When I was writing
article, I did the problem solving and writing.

Then the professor went through it multiple times and we rewrote a lot of it.
Initial push - the choice of problem and choice of articles to read so that I
learn enough to even start were also instrumental to my research. It would not
be possible without it.

I don't think it is entirely unfair for professor to get credit for that.
Knowing what to do, which problem has reasonable potential and is open,
knowing what is potentially related and knowing what to read matter a lot. As
in, it is be easy and possible to replace student and harder to replace
professor in the whole thing.

~~~
yodsanklai
Totally agree. However, in many instances, some people listed as authors
didn't contribute in any way to the article. They may have attended a meeting
at some point, or there may be a local culture where you have to include your
PhD advisor no matter what.

On the other hand, there are researchers who wouldn't put their name on an
article unless they contributed significantly.

~~~
distant_hat
I had an advisor who wanted his own name and 2 of his students names on a
paper where his only contribution was giving some reagent.

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tokai
It doesn't surprise me that many of the prolific authors are in medical and
life sciences. I have worked with validating registered research at a large
hospital (actually a conglomerate of multiple hospitals) and the physicians
there had the most 'creative' ways of registering their research I have ever
seen. Interviewed by a journalist? Let's put that down as a peer reviewed
journal article. It was absolutely jaw dropping some of the things they tried
to get way with in order to inflate their publication numbers. I'm sure that
many other tricks are being used, like pressuring students to publish papers
and get your name on them without any work, etc. Citation cartels have been
uncovered among journals that you wouldn't normally think to be predatory, and
are indexed by Scopus and/or WoS. It would not surprise me the least if
publication cartels exists as well, with editors and reviewers agreeing to let
anything get published in exchange for returning the favor.

~~~
amelius
Another way is to simply use existing methods applied to a new gene/molecule.
So in principle you're just doing the work of a laboratory technician, but you
get to publish a scientific article.

~~~
whatshisface
That still sounds like potentially useful work to me, I always appreciate it
when I'm looking something up and can find those gigantic tables of everything
applied to everything. Perhaps not a Nature paper but at least it's something.

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sbdmmg
"In high-energy and particle physics, projects are done by large international
teams that can have upwards of 1,000 members. All participants are listed as
authors as a mark of membership of the team, not for writing or revising the
papers. We therefore excluded authors in physics."

One important point that the authors are missing is that most of the results
published by those teams are null results. This doesn't happen in the other
fields considered in the article, e.g. medicine, where there is often a
positive-results bias, despite the lower number of publications per author.

------
DanielleMolloy
Some agencies issuing grants have started only allowing mentioning n (e.g.
n=10) important publications in grant applications. I think this is a good
temporary workaround for some of the bad incentives in the current system.

You will give a negative impression if:

\+ you can not find 10 high-quality articles in your body of work

\+ you are not the first author on any of the 10 articles

\+ influential work is more positively rewarded than with the h-index

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blablablerg
Are they also the first author? that is the relevant question. Letting a PhD
do all the work and just slapping your name at the end of the 'author'-list
hardly seems authorship.

By this definition a CEO of a building company builds a flat in whole year
just by himself.

~~~
Amygaz
The end of the list is called Senior author and is very important and sometime
a point of contention between collaborators. Still, if your name is on the
list it’s because you presumably had a significant scientific contribution.

So no, being a CEO is not an automatic qualification. It’s actually a good
measure of how narcissistic a CEO is.

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toolslive
There's another source (I've seen'em do it!). Some computer scientists rehash
their papers constantly so _almost_ the same paper gets published in a variety
of magazines.

~~~
r_c_a_d
Some? Probably most. A project I worked on produced a "here is what we have
just started doing" paper in year 1, then a "we have some more results" paper
in year 2, and two slightly different "here is what we ended up with" papers
in year 3.

But what do you expect? The system rewards publication above everything. And
these are intelligent people. Of course they are going to maximise the
numbers. Because if they don't, they get fired and replaced by people who
will.

After 10 years in industry (publishing patents, not papers) I contacted my PhD
adviser and asked what chance he thought I had of getting an academic job. His
answer was equivocal, "none".

~~~
FabHK
I had a professor that spoke fondly of the LPU, the "least publishable unit".
And, needless to say, you shouldn't waste more than one LPU on one paper...

(Side note: I was amused to see that the LPU has a wikipedia article. It also
references "Salami publishing"... Side side note: I was also amused to see
that the acronym LPU also stands for "Lovely Professional University" in
India.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit)

~~~
Paul-ish
On the flip side I've been working on the same project with lots of progress
but no publication for years. There are drawbacks.

I need to graduate at some point and I am afraid my lack of publication will
hold me back. I have been working on this project for years and have no
feedback from the community. There may be things I've been missing for a long
time.

There's a balance to strike here.

------
frumiousirc
Shouldn't this article by replaced with a single sentence: "Some
collaborations are large and their individuals have normal publication rates
yet the entire collaboration is listed"?

~~~
tokai
Those large collab papers are hilarious. I once ordered a paper through inter
library loan. I got an envelope with the paper in, but when I leafed through
it I realized that it was about 12 pages with only a title and author names.
Some one had not looked through to confirm that all the pages were there
before sending it, and I could understand why. Didn't count the names but it
must have been several hundreds. Good luck assigning author rank from their
order!

~~~
maxnoe
The Thing is, in today's physics experiments at that scale, you cannot
distinguish the amounts of work. Basically everyone in the collaboration will
have a non-zero share. A paper about a specific analysis would not be possible
without the people who designed the experiment, build it, maintain it, do the
actual data taking, wrote the analysis software, do dev-ops in the data center
etc etc etc.

So there is only one fair solution, list everyone in alphabetical order.

And if two LHC experiments publish together, that's > 2000 people.

~~~
FartyMcFarter
> wrote the analysis software, do dev-ops in the data center etc etc etc.

These things are true for other fields as well (machine learning for example),
but they don't result in authorship in other fields.

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dschuetz
If Einstein was still alive he'll probably say: "I've been publishing papers
before it was mainstream!"

~~~
Viliam1234
Einstein? You mean the guy who could only publish four papers during his most
successful year? By today's standard he probably wouldn't even get a PhD.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers)

------
ataturk
I'm sure my graduate adviser appears to be a high-frequency publisher (before
he became Dean). His name was on every paper that his 9-10 PhD students got
published and rightly so--he got us the funding, helped us formulate ideas and
perform the research, smoothed over our screwups, and even helped write the
papers themselves.

------
kapauldo
That's called soft fraud.

~~~
angry_octet
I think many of these authors should be featured or retraction watch:

[https://retractionwatch.com/2018/09/12/when-it-comes-to-
auth...](https://retractionwatch.com/2018/09/12/when-it-comes-to-authorship-
how-prolific-is-too-prolific/)

I have chosen to have a paper pulled when I was added as an author without my
knowledge. (They had used some of my unpublished work.) These journals should
do the same, establishing a minimum threshold of active contribution.

