I found odd they choose not to talk about salami science[0].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...
Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
81–90 of 157 posts
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#82I 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…
Indeed not surprising at all. Some of our facility people (like sequencing or biobanking) insist that you add them as coauthor if the facility did some work for you
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#83In 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...
For anyone interested in learning more about Erdos, he has a fascinating life story well told in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman.
It's available for free on Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL354306M/
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#84In 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...
Erdős was also known to habitually take stimulants like benzedrine and ritalin.
I think he was already quite prolific before that started.
IMO, it is a bit of a myth that Adderall will make an already productive person more productive.
However, stimulants do motivate compulsive behaviors and rigid thinking.
That's where it would have helped Erdos. To just do math everyday and never be much interested in other pursuits takes something extra. Even into old age he didn't have anything else on the bucket list.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#85John 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...
Nothing happened to Ioannidis. He did his job as a scientist and said what he thought was right, even when everybody disagreed with him.
So he was wrong? So what? To be a scientist means to blunder a lot. In fact, to be a scientist means to (be willing to) blunder much, much more than everybody else because that is the only way to learn. Science, ultimately, only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#86As 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…
Michael Stonebraker referred to this as "Diarrhea of papers" https://www.idug.org/browse/blogs/blogviewer?blogkey=a7b6fe8... And he more or less says the focus on quantity has made the academic field (databases) irrelevant, because individual papers don't tell you anything useful. (Disclaimer: My interpretation of his talk, and I don't work in that field.)
My interpretation of his claim is it’s no longer a good career move to focus on big-picture research. It’s better to attack problems with narrow scope or superficial impact. Some of those papers are useful, but they’re not the most important problems in practice.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#87In 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
This study is specifically about hyper prolific authors who have their name on 72 or more publications in a single year. Which they filtered down to a few hundred, and then a chunk of those were associated with large cohort studies. So the list does get down to around a hundred that aren't caught in one of those filters.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#88> 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…
It definitely feels a little odd. If everyone is an author, then does authorship really matter?
Is authorship broken out in any way? I would think it could be useful to do something like credits on a movie. Here are the writers, the directors, the producers. And then here is the lighting team, and this team worked on these special effects, this other team on these other effects, etc.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#89I 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.
In the fields of physics I'm familiar with the group leader is usually listed last on papers. They get credit wherever they are in the author list, while being first or second author carries more cachet for students and postdocs who are trying to establish their careers.
Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What the heck happened to John Ioannidis?" (about his publications during the Covid epidemic.) https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...
Nothing happened to Ioannidis. He did his job as a scientist and said what he thought was right, even when everybody disagreed with him. So he was wrong? So what? To be a scientist means to blunder a lot. In fact, to be a scientist means to (be willing to) blunder much, much more than everybody else because that is the only way to learn. Science, ultimately, only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong .
Well, he also decided it was appropriate to insult the physical appearance of grad students on twitter who disagreed with him. He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.