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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)

#71

Post by lost_tourist »

wcarss wrote: post #17

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 rema…

You get down to 100 authors in countries like the US and China? No way. There are 1000+ significant scientists and acheivements easily

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

#72

Post by idealmedtech »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #67
idealmedtech wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But determining first authorship itself is non-trivial, as different fields and different journals have different conventions and norms.

Yep, not to mention many groups will list new members higher up so they get cred faster

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

#73

Post by mike_hearn »

londons_explore wrote: post #26
GalenErso wrote: post #11

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…

> Nearly one-third of World Bank reports have never been downloaded, not even once. This surprises me... At the very least, most search engines download PDF's to index them. And the web archive crawler would probably be expected to visit something like the world bank too. And I would guess most governments around the world would have a team of economists which would be expected to have read reports by the world bank.…

The counts were determined using a web analytics package which presumably can separate crawler downloads from real users.

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

#74

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

jccalhoun wrote: post #43

I got my phd in the humanities and from the outside the sciences have always looked like a pyramid scheme. I'm sure it isn't but it is hard to imagine actually collaborating with so many people on so many papers.

A now-flagged sibling post objected to the description of academia as a pyramid scheme and asked how that description could be justified.

If we're splitting hairs, it's closer to an MLM than it is to a Ponzi.

Each professor has to run a lab, which requires several students. Those students are nominally being trained to become professors who will run their own labs, and so on.

What this ignores (like MLMs) is that market saturation will ensue, and the "infinite chain" nature of recruitment cannot be continued once that point is hit. At equilibrium, each professor can have only one student over the course of their career. Or, allowing for losses to other fields, only a very few students. Certainly not enough to continue the prolific paper-mill output we see today.

The system only continues to work today (and only in engineering and some sciences) because there is a large enough market for PhDs outside academia.

In the humanities and arguably in physics, the system already does not work.

To be as offensive as possible, it's as though a primitive people continued breeding beyond the carrying capacity of the land. Malthus says mortality will start going up. What we actually see, non-metaphorically, is serious distress from humanities PhDs who languish in poverty-level adjunct roles.

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

#75

Post by borroka »

rockostrich wrote: post #8
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 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.

There are also incentives for others to include him as a co-author despite the fact that, presumably, he has come nowhere near the minimum work that would be expected to allow him to be included as such.

The question "Did you publish a paper with [famous scientist/researcher]" is not too different from the question "Did you go to dinner with [famous actress/entertainer/]" in other contexts. The give some clout, recognition, some minor envy from others.

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

#76

Post by anonymouskimmer »

elashri wrote: post #58

> The vast majority of hyperprolific authors (7,888 author records, 86%) published in physics. 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. While this is true in general, I'm part of…

"and would involve a couple of hundred people between the review committee, physics group and the collaboration at large who post questions, comments and revise every bit of information."

I'm curious whether much of this work materially differs from the work done by peer reviewers in the journal review process. If it does then authorship may be fine, if it doesn't then it seems that either the internal reviewers should be separately listed on the article as reviewers instead of authors, or that a journal's peer reviewers should also be listed as authors.

"Regarding authorship for papers I did not involve in writing directly, I'm fine with that norm in our field because that's fair. Most of the work needed to produce results is not doing the actual analysis for the data but operating this huge machine and the service work (software development, control room shifts, hardware R&D Data quality …etc) is most of the work."

Whenever I do this kind of work and am offered an authorship I ask for an acknowledgement instead. It's akin to me to citing the company you purchased your equipment and reagents from (actually designing and constructing your equipment is an important part of the job, too). You cite them, you don't add them as a co-author.

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

#77

Post by anonymouskimmer »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #68
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.

"What the heck happened to John Ioannidis?" (about his publications during the Covid epidemic.) https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...

I think the preamble of the article you linked is important for the consideration of others in opening the link:

"John Ioannidis is one of the most published and influential scientists in the world, someone whose skewering of bad medical research we at SBM have frequently lauded over the years. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Since then, Prof. Ioannidis has been publishing dubious studies that minimize the dangers of the coronavirus, shown up in the media to decry “lockdowns,” and, most recently, “punched down”, attacking a graduate student for having criticized him. What happened? Did Prof. Ioannidis change, or was he always like this and I just didn’t see it? Either way, he’s a cautionary tale of how even science watchdogs can fall prey to hubris."

Great find.

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

#78

Post by Bedon292 »

lost_tourist wrote: post #70
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…

So I still don't understand why these professors don't have their name second after the student author. It's still prestigious to guiding some of the best minds but also very honest, maybe even have a special symbol to indicate it as such in parenthesis.

I am sure it can be different everywhere, but at least my advisor in grad school was great about making sure the students were ahead of him in the list. The student(s) who were primarily responsible were first and then he would be on it after.

Out of curiosity I checked and he has 161 publications on Google Scholar. Of the publications with multiple authors he is first author on only 7 of them. And then 7 are single author.

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

#79

Post by anonymouskimmer »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #74
jccalhoun wrote: post #43

I got my phd in the humanities and from the outside the sciences have always looked like a pyramid scheme. I'm sure it isn't but it is hard to imagine actually collaborating with so many people on so many papers.

A now-flagged sibling post objected to the description of academia as a pyramid scheme and asked how that description could be justified. If we're splitting hairs, it's closer to an MLM than it is to a Ponzi. Each professor has to run a lab, which requires several students. Those students are nominally being trained to become professors who will run their own labs, and so on. What this ignores (like MLMs) is that mar…

"At equilibrium, each professor can have only one student over the course of their career. Or, allowing for losses to other fields, only a very few students. Certainly not enough to continue the prolific paper-mill output we see today."

This problem is solved in part by most professors only working at undergraduate or Master's awarding institutions. If you limit Ph.D.s to R1s, then you can have big labs with many grad students at equilibrium.

It's solved in another part by having both master's and doctoral students (allowing two* students per career at equilibrium), and by having post-docs (not a student, technically, but still a paper-miller). With a doctor typically now having two or three post-docs during a career this allows for an additional two or three paper-millers per career at equilibrium. And the post-docs are much better at producing papers than the students.

It's solved in third part by exporting Ph.D.s.

It's solved in a fourth part by the less frequent people who have multiple doctorates.

And in a fifth part by incorporating the many more undergraduates in the research and paper producing apparatus.

Is this unsustainable? Yes. And more importantly a bunch of it shouldn't be done. We should be publishing results updates in lieu of full papers, until enough results have accumulated for a good paper. But what have you.

Edit to add a sixth part: Collaborating with a fellow professor who does have a grad student.

* - actually more than two, as there are typically more master's recipients than doctoral recipients.

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

#80

Post by Aunche »

GalenErso wrote: post #11

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…

It's depressing that despite how much information is painstakingly gathered, available for free on the internet, people still choose to get their information about economics and policy from memes that have no basis on reality. For example, whenever you see someone mention the World Bank's studies of the reduction, you'll inevitably see a highly upvoted response of how this is actually bad because it means subsidence farmers' livelyhoods are being replaced by sTArVatION wAGeS. However, if they bothered to read the source, they'd know that the international poverty isn't measured by wages at all but by consumption.
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