I didn't mean to imply outright plagiarism everywhere all the time. I think there are many ways to get inflated numbers.
If a PI has 3 collaborator PIs and each PI has 4 students writing a paper every three months then the PIs can get 48 publications a year. Over 20 years, there's your O(1000) publications in a model with no substantial PI time contribution.
Given teaching loads, home life, university admin, academic duties like reviews I'd be surprised if a senior academic got 3 days per week to do research. I'd say at that rate the 4 first-author level contribution publications per year model would be optimistic. So a more realistic cap on the quality work someone could do in 20 years might be 80 publications.
I've worked in a similar system to what you described, with the top-most PI contributing essentially zero to publications directly. However, their fundraising efforts were singlehandedly paying the stipends/salary of 40+ researchers under them. I felt like it was totally fair to include them in the authors list, given that the research wouldn't have been possible without their efforts.
I doubt the parent academic had O(1000) first author publications, nor is that mentioned in the article.
The grant application usually already laid out the research plan, hypothesis, state of the art etc.
Even if there are massive changes later on, the person who wrote the grant application often provided enough scientific input to merit a co-authorship.
This is a totally fair point. There is a contribution from leadership.
But to track back to what was getting me bothered, it's the implication when Professor X is discussed or introduced somewhere that they personally thought up and wrote O(1000) publications.
I know good PIs guide the research activities of their groups as well rather than just creaming off publications.
But while I understand where you're coming from, stepping back and thinking about it 'authorship as a reward for leadership' could be a sign of unhealthiness in academia. Why can't authorship mean authorship and leadership be recognised separately? 'Professor X runs a highly successful lab of N researchers, who produced M papers last year, and manages a budget of Z dollars.'
There are people who behave this way. They offer valuable insight and advice, as well as money, and in return get thanked in the paper, and their grant numbers printed there. But not authorship, if they didn't write the paper. If you look up "author" in the dictionary it's pretty clear.
I actually wonder if journals should start offering a second list of names on the first page, or even three to allow both group-leader and technical-work credit. Has this ever been tried?
This seems to be a general trend in film as well. Look at a recent movie credits (accountants, administrative assistants, lawyers and the like) versus the very short list of people who actually contributed to a film on an old film. Everyone likes to see their name in lights.
>> If a PI has 3 collaborator PIs and each PI has 4 students writing a paper every three months then the PIs can get 48 publications a year. Over 20 years, there's your O(1000) publications in a model with no substantial PI time contribution.
I don't know how to square this expectation with my experience, as a PhD student (currently). My own problem with my thesis advisor is that I'm concerned that I don't contribute enough to our joint papers, because he's doing much of the job- most of the ideas are his and he writes at least half of each paper, and codes the odd implementation. And he's been doing that for the last 30 years or so (though not with me, obviously!).
I have heard the rumours- that career academics let their students do the hard work and just put their name on the finished paper. However, that presuposes that PhD students are already capable scientists who can be trusted to write a publisheable paper entirely on their own, even in their first year. I think that anyone who's been through a PhD, or helped guide someone through theirs will know how rare that is. Even just figuring out what an original contribution means in your chosen field can take a long time- unless, that is, you have someone at hand who understands the field, knows the bibliography and can recommend a promising research subject and also methods. At that point, that person has already done 1/3 of the work for you- figured out what you should try to publish. The other two thirds are to do the research and actually write up the paper.
Btw, in the UK were I study, the done thing is that the student's name goes first in any joint papers, while that of the advisor, or in any case, the most experienced member of the research team generally goes last. The advisor will still get citations to their name of course, but so will the people preceding them - and the first author, who is usually the student, will appear as the principal author whenever the names of the researchers are referenced (e.g. in author-year citation formats, or in slides, etc).
I tend to see this as a substantial boost to my own career as a researcher. Maybe even too much of a boost, in a way. I don't like to think I'm riding on someone else's coattails. But, the fact of the matter is that at the start of your research career, inevitably, that's what you are doing.
This varies between fields a lot. In economics, I haven't seen many cases of e.g. thesis advisors rubberstamping their name on to someone else's work - not that it doesn't happen, but it is rare, and it would get you a bad rep if it became visible. In other fields I've interacted with, it seems quite standard for the lab leader or chair to get their name on every paper of the lab, and for papers to be padded with authors who did not contribute that much.
If a PI has 3 collaborator PIs and each PI has 4 students writing a paper every three months then the PIs can get 48 publications a year. Over 20 years, there's your O(1000) publications in a model with no substantial PI time contribution.
Given teaching loads, home life, university admin, academic duties like reviews I'd be surprised if a senior academic got 3 days per week to do research. I'd say at that rate the 4 first-author level contribution publications per year model would be optimistic. So a more realistic cap on the quality work someone could do in 20 years might be 80 publications.