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Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

nature.com

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Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#11

Post by GalenErso »

Related.

The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads: https://archive.vn/N6Gvy

Does Anyone Ever Read PDFs? https://priceonomics.com/does-anyone-ever-read-pdfs/

"Nearly one-third of World Bank reports have never been downloaded, not even once.”" "Over 30% of the 1,611 policy reports published from 2008 to 2012 were never downloaded. As each report costs an average of $180,000 in terms of researchers’ time and other expenses, a ballpark estimate of the amount of money spent researching and writing reports that did not merit a single download is $93 million. In addition, 87% of the reports went uncited."

Dear Think Tanks: Nobody is Reading Your PDFs: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dear-think-tanks-nobody-readi...

World Bank learns most PDFs it produces go unread: https://www.smh.com.au/world/world-bank-learns-most-pdfs-it-...

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#12

Post by SiempreViernes »

snapcaster wrote: post #2

So 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

Basically its mostly people in powerful positions that use their power to convert minor contributions to paper credit.

There's a list of self reported reasons how they achieve this seemingly high productivity, and the most honest bit is probably:

* mentorship of very many young researchers

* leadership of a research team, or even of many teams

* extensive collaboration

* working on multiple research areas or in core services

* availability of suitable extensive resources and data

* culmination of a large project

with the latter points giving more transient productivity.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#13

Post by SiempreViernes »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #3

As 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 t…

These are mostly people that are bossing other people around, and just review the work occasionally, not actually creating whole drafts.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#14

Post by 323 »

stenl wrote: post #5

John 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 takes a scammer to spot a scammer.

If you know that there is wide spread fraud in science, and you know how it's done, why not profit and publish a paper on it?

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#15

Post by ZhangSWEFAANG »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #3

As 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 t…

[flagged]

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#16

Post by adg001 »

Sure. Publishing means having your name listed among the authors. This does not necessarily translate in the production of results, or in the active participation in the writing process.

An interesting statistic would be the number of scientists who are able to publish a paper every five days or so, while going solo in their work. Essentially nobody, I suppose, for so many reasons I will not list here.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#17

Post by wcarss »

In summary, once you remove large teams like in particle physics and biomedicine and long running major cohort studies, and fix the data for bad disambiguation of non-Western author names, you get down to around a hundred people.

Of those, the most prolific authors are in countries that reward authorship with money, and so seem much more potentially related to corruption on average, and of the best sample of the remainder, most who bothered to respond in a survey aggreed they did not mostly meet all 4 of the somewhat-rigorous Vancouver criteria of authorship, like "substantially contributed to the idea of the paper" and "drafted most of the paper".

The paper concludes, "ultimately you'd have to read an author's work to understand what they've actually done".

So... this is kind of an interesting review of the data and why it may be what it is, but it seems like there are relatively few truly "hyper-prolific" (if any!) scientists out there.

I'd be interested to see a much more rigorous study of the mid range of smaller fields: the authors who do contribute substantially to say, 10-15 papers a year for a few years. Who are they? What is their work, and maybe most interestingly: _how_ do they work?

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#18

Post by throw_pm23 »

version_five wrote: post #9

I 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 th…

I was in a similar group a decade ago. At the time, I found it impressive and efficient, but looking back now, I find much of those papers not to amount to much. I wonder what your experience is: were those 30 papers per year good science overall?

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#19

Post by londons_explore »

stenl wrote: post #5

John 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.

A paper is only a few pages long usually. A read of a paper takes perhaps half an hour. And in that time, you might even be able to check some references, make a few edits, or drop an email to someone to gather some more results for a figure or two.

Doing this once a week seems very reasonable.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#20

Post by bell-cot »

In Mathematics, there is Paul Erdős* - who published >1,500 papers, with 500+ co-authors, in a ~65-year professional career. Though he is recognized as being very, very unusual. And Mathematics has the huge advantage of not needing the labs, equipment, experiments, etc. that restrict pretty much any "science" to a far slower pace.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Erd%C5%91s_num...

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