11 ms·
Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)
- dang 4y agoDiscussed at the time: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17970938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17970938 - Sept 2018 (41 comments)
- snapcaster 4y agoSo 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
- idealmedtech 4y agoWhen 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.
- rjmunro 4y agoBut sometimes it is reserved for the person whose name happens to come first in the alphabet: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/29/alphabetical-name-ordering-is-discriminatory-and-harmful-to-collaborations/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/29/al...
- jonnycomputer 4y agoBut determining first authorship itself is non-trivial, as different fields and different journals have different conventions and norms.
- idealmedtech 4y agoYep, not to mention many groups will list new members higher up so they get cred faster
- SiempreViernes 4y agoBasically 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.
- jonp888 4y agoHere's a quick guide: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=562 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=562
- Maken 4y agoThis is painfully accurate.
- throw_pm23 4y agoAs 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.
- SiempreViernes 4y agoThese are mostly people that are bossing other people around, and just review the work occasionally, not actually creating whole drafts.
- psychphysic 4y agoMost won't know how or literally what to put down on a paper and who to send it to for publication. If you can independently write a paper you can supervise many more and provide valuable insight from your experience.
- ZhangSWEFAANG 4y ago[flagged]
- throw_pm23 4y agoI used to think like that as a teenager, but honestly I think it is a self-limiting philosophy. Some may find extreme industriousness attractive though. In communist countries they used to give a "Stakhanov-prize" to people who produced the most items in a week or month.
- ZhangSWEFAANG 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stenl 4y agoJohn 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=datesearch.y_10 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.
- rockostrich 4y agoIt 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.
- borroka 4y agoThere 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.
- __seka__ 4y ago> Prevention Research Center and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford Aren't those roles supposed to hold a significant amount of responsibility and therefore require a certain level of commitment? A day has only 24 hours. How much time do you think someone in such a position can dedicate to reviewing papers?
- 323 4y agoIt 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?
- reaperducer 4y agoUp next: ScienceGPT
- beAbU 4y agoI guess you don't know about SciGen: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
- kmoser 4y agoThat site gives an Internal Server Error after submitting the form.
- amelius 4y agoThis is how many PIs treat their students: as an AI tool with paper writing capabilities. The upside: soon we can all be PIs!
- version_five 4y agoI 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
- throw_pm23 4y agoI 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?
- foobarian 4y agoNot OP but a thing to consider: the training the junior members gain from the process is valuable too. Those 30 papers may not amount to much, but if even one of the primary authors ends up with Nobel-caliber work once in their career, was that worth it?
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoAre those junior members learning to do Nobel-caliber work or are they learning to pad their CVs by publishing tons of low-impact papers?
- version_five 4y agoAre those the only two options?
- foobarian 4y ago
- GalenErso 4y agoRelated. The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads: https://archive.vn/N6Gvy https://archive.vn/N6Gvy Does Anyone Ever Read PDFs? https://priceonomics.com/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-reading-your-pdfs-kurt-voelker 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-produces-go-unread-20140509-zr7fs.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/world-bank-learns-most-pdfs-it-...
- londons_explore 4y ago> 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. I can only suspect they were hidden away behind a login-wall or deliberately obscure because they contained information that officially had to be public, but someone wanted to not be revealed.
- mike_hearn 4y agoThe counts were determined using a web analytics package which presumably can separate crawler downloads from real users.
- Aunche 4y agoIt'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.
- adg001 4y agoSure. 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.
- wcarss 4y agoIn 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?
- lost_tourist 4y agoYou get down to 100 authors in countries like the US and China? No way. There are 1000+ significant scientists and acheivements easily
- Bedon292 4y agoThis 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.
- bell-cot 4y agoIn 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_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Erd%C5%91s_num...
- make3 4y agothat's another thing, some people become so famous that having a paper with them is a big mark of prestige (erdos number), and people start to try to add them to papers they only marginally looked in the general direction of at best
- bell-cot 4y agoQuite true. Though for Erdős, the huge number of coauthors was far more a side-effect of his, um, "extreme itinerant" professional lifestyle.
- throw_pm23 4y agoAlso 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.)
- bell-cot 4y agoOh, 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.
- 4y ago
- whoevercares 4y agoPublishing paper is a sort of training for PHD students. That’s why there are many papers but rarely useful
- macleginn 4y agoThat sweet bullet point from the Vancouver criteria: ‘Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.’ Seems to be nearly universally violated, no matter how many authors a paper has.
- graymatters 4y agoIt’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.
- throw_pm23 4y agoSome PhD advisors often simply turn down being a co-author, even if they contributed some crucial help or idea. Sometimes it is modesty or generosity, sometimes a gentle way to say the work is not very good :) More seriously, the solution is not to use content-oblivious measures (e.g. number of papers/citations) when evaluating researchers.
- canjobear 4y agoIn many fields there is an informal distinction based on author position. The first author(s) likely did most of the work and/or wrote the paper. The last author(s), usually called senior authors, are the ones who organized, supervised, etc.
- DiscoDays 4y agoHow would you formulate what the problem is and why it is time to do something about it?
- jccalhoun 4y agoI 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.
- ZhangSWEFAANG 4y ago[flagged]
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y agoThere is a big difference between articles in humanities that are published and those published from labs. Humanities papers are way less templated and usually aren't co-authored in the same way as lab papers are. Humanities papers also often lead the reader through the research and argument, while lab papers often simply state findings or report results. Humanities publishing has its own....idiosyncrasies though, like how certain journals become private fiefdoms for certain intellectual movements or approaches that never subject themselves to real scrutiny. The same citing hijinks also happen. It's a very "I'll pat you on the back if you'll pat mine" system. There are also different expectations of style, for lack of a better word for it. Humanities papers are often held to certain aesthetic standards that are different than lab papers.
- FooBarBizBazz 4y agoA 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.
- Overtonwindow 4y agoI blame China. As a researcher in China, you were told to publish, as often as possible, OR ELSE. that's leads to a constant publishing of useless papers. China took the whole idea of "publish or perish" into overdrive.
- johntiger1 4y agoAlso here in Canada. Only the US is perfect!!11 obvious /s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jononomo 4y agoI was recently listening to a podcast in which a professor was introduced as being the author of over 250 articles. I immediately discounted the guy as likely an unserious thinker. (It was Tim Rasinski being interviewed on The Literacy View podcast). Sure enough, he didn't impress me at all as the interview progressed -- apparently he is just a guy who has learned how to play the academic game and can't think critically.
- elashri 4y ago> 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 one of these Collaboration at LHC and I find that publishing a paper is taking a lot of effort and revision (not talking about actual research) 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. It is amazing to always see how to final product is almost very different from the first draft in each aspect. This process on average takes a couple of months. I will confess that I'm guilty of not participating into this duty for each paper but I'm always sure that there are many people who will do that. 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. People usually find this strange (more polite description of them saying it is absurd) but let's be real. The era of individual contribution (or small group) in experimental particle physics had almost ended by the cathode rays.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago"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.
- nzach 4y agoI found odd they choose not to talk about salami science[0]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_slicing_in_scientific_publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...
- tomlue 4y agowow, starting to feel like papers are not a good metric for scientific progress. Who would've thought...
- f1shy 4y agoI work in a company where in the job description for some positions you have to show that you have a long publishing record... sighs... Great place to "work"...
- rhacker 4y agoIf you have a ton of clinical data on random people, the medicines they have been prescribed, ailments, procedures, etc... it makes sense that blasting millions of queries at that data will produce many papers in medicine for tons of conditions.
- psychphysic 4y agoNot surprising at all. It reflects a shift in science to one-two people endeavours to group work. If you use someone's lab, or you take up time they are paid for or that uses a grant they need to be able to reflect that in publications.
- culebron21 4y agoI've read a huge book [1] of a broad research on universities in different countries, and this is what the book told. Science metrics, when used to determine scientific significance by government officials, become abused. This law was articulated back in 1920s, if I remember correctly. And this is one of the cases. Science was not like this until quite recently -- citation metrics were first used in the 1980s by neoliberal government of the UK (because those in the libertarian political spectrum tend to distrust public sector and love _efficiency_). The idea behind the use of citation ratings was to determine more efficient universities and support them. According to recent studies, this hasn't changed the hierarchy of universities in the UK -- it preserved it and actually made more rigid. As a side effect, there's this publications race. Still, British academia is rather modest in ratings: it only uses them to evaluate all university or a faculty. In countries that are trying to catch up in science, metrics are applied at the level of an individual researcher, and make bonuses or position depend on it. They demand a certain lever of a citation index, and demand papers published in journals no lower than Nth quartile in some ranking. This basically means you must abandon teaching, join as co-author on as many papers as possible. If one makes any good research, they usually split it into several papers over couple of years -- because bonuses. Some join so-called citation cartels, and this is probably one of them. [1] https://ecsoc.hse.ru/en/2016-17-4/192208750.html https://ecsoc.hse.ru/en/2016-17-4/192208750.html
- wrp 4y agoThat book is a massive sociological study of academic Sociology. There is no detailed summary in English, but the PDF of the review is online. I just ran it through Google Translate. (https://publications.hse.ru/pubs/share/folder/0mbqwfls21/192733339.pdf https://publications.hse.ru/pubs/share/folder/0mbqwfls21/192...)
- culebron21 4y agoWell, they made a goal to show how careers work in academia. Sure, from the point of view of a sociologist researcher, but it's not much different from other sciences. And in every section (France, USA, UK, Germany, Russia) they explain how promotion works, how selection of researchers works, what the managers or professors pay attention to, and so on. So this works as an explanation of internals of entire academia.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- raincom 4y agoA rector of a University in a Dutch speaking country is a perfect example of this. Probably, people from Belgium/Netherlands can figure out who that is.