Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
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Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#2So what's going on here? It seems fraudulent but also "published paper" and "authorship" seems to be poorly defined terms with no clear consensus on what it means
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#3As an academic (CS), I'm able to write one or two decent papers a year, in a very good year, three.
Looking at colleagues who write ten a year I already get existential angst, and have to actively tell myself that life is not a competition and some things are more important.
Writing fifty (while also teaching, writing grants, mentoring students, etc.) seems mind-numbing, even just in terms of the relatively routine tasks of formatting or proofreading papers, aligning figures, corresponding with reviewers, editors, co-authors, etc.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#4[deleted]
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#5John PA Ioannidis, one of the authors of that paper (which is from 2018 btw) has published an average of 60 papers per year for the last decade, and more than 1100 in total (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Ioannidis+JPA&filter=d...). I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even have time to read most of his own papers.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#6Up next: ScienceGPT
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#7So what's going on here? It seems fraudulent but also "published paper" and "authorship" seems to be poorly defined terms with no clear consensus on what it means
When you get a certain level of academic inertia (tons of postdocs under you etc), you get author credit even when you don't actively participate in the research or writing itself. What's more interesting is how many first author papers are published per year, per author. First author is typically reserved for someone who did a significant amount of the work on the paper.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#8John PA Ioannidis, one of the authors of that paper (which is from 2018 btw) has published an average of 60 papers per year for the last decade, and more than 1100 in total ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Ioannidis+JPA&filter=d... ). I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even have time to read most of his own papers.
It looks like he's second to last or last author on most of those papers which typically means he's the advisor for the graduate student/post-doc that's actually doing the work. It's still an insane number of papers to be a part of but considering Ioannidis is director of the Prevention Research Center and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford it's not really that insane.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#9I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and organizing the research as well as challenging the results and strengthening the presentation of the paper. So he was probably on 20-30 papers a year.
In my view this was completely above board, it's the role of a research leader and warrants co-authorship. I don't consider this situation particularly exceptional and I can easily imagine that number going much higher with more organization and focus
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#10Up next: ScienceGPT
I guess you don't know about SciGen: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/