61–70 of 157 posts
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...
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?
It is unfortunate in many ways (not all).
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
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.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/29/al...
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also quite many of his papers are 1-2 pages long, without much of "motivation" or "context", in the form: - Here is a problem that was posed by ... . Here is our solution to it. Here are some follow-up questions. (Which is actually refreshing and nice, just different from a current typical paper.)
Oh, yes. The long and pompous drivel that scientific papers seem to be padded with these days makes me wonder if they're all busy gaming "paper length" metrics, playing to an imagined audience of clueless could-be-donor billionaires, or what.
I am a little shocked at how many papers are fewer than four double-spaced pages, scarcely more than a tweet if you're trying to explain something that is fundamentally new to people who aren't intimately involved in that exact corner of that exact subfield.
(If my metric for "quality" was "it might frontpage if posted to HN", the superficial characteristics of the paper would be "about 25 pages with a splashy image on the first page" but unfortunately you can't tell that from the abstract, but maybe you can get the number of pages and the content first page without downloading the whole PDF.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Most research amounts to nothing. It’s why they call it research. But we can’t get the 1% of breakthroughs without the 4% of hits, 93% meh’s, and 2% frauds. Not to mention that much published research is mistaken. Above all, it’s hard (at least in the sciences). So anyone willing to follow the scientific method and package their results into a whitepaper is doing good science. The scientific method is ultimately the…
It is also true that some (published) research may go unnoticed and be discovered or rediscovered (much of science is the rediscovery of ideas that were once speculative and then became valuable because of a change in methods, technology, paradigm) later on. It is a rare occurrence, though, which does not justify the hours, money, energy spent on endeavors that everyone knows are, to the greater community of scientists, researchers, and citizens, meaningless and worthless.
But part of the currency used in science is the number of papers, place of publication, citations received and overall impact on the field of the papers, and the deluge of worthless articles and research is a direct effect of the metrics chosen to evaluate scientists.
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
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.
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’s time to do something about that. Isn’t it time to have two categories of authorship on (scientific) papers - authors and enablers? The latter is for people who organized, supervised and otherwise enabled the work etc. Other suggestions how to address the problem are welcome.
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…