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

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?