<story><title>Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06185-8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tinkerteller</author><text>This is a great study and gives insights in to what&amp;#x27;s wrong with research today. As the study has uncovered the causes:&lt;p&gt;- mentorship of very many young researchers&lt;p&gt;- leadership of a research team&lt;p&gt;- becoming full professors, department chairs&lt;p&gt;- leadership roles in large centres&lt;p&gt;As the paper states: &lt;i&gt;at the peak of their productivity, some cardiologists publish 10 to 80 times more papers in one year compared with their average annual productivity when they were 35–42 years old. There was also often a sharp decrease after passing the chair to a successor.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In other words, people with checkbooks gets their names engraved on work that is being done by &lt;i&gt;others&lt;/i&gt;. Their author metrics like h-index and citation counts would shoot up and the get credit for scholarly publications even if they have played little or no part.&lt;p&gt;This is extremely sad. These people in leadership roles should be avoiding taking credit to scholarly work that is not theirs.&lt;p&gt;As the article says, requirements for authorship are the &amp;quot;Vancouver criteria&amp;quot; established in 1988. These specify that authors must do all of four things to qualify: play a part in designing or conducting experiments or processing results; help to write or revise the manuscript; approve the published version; and take responsibility for the article’s contents.&lt;p&gt;The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors does not count supervision, mentoring or obtaining funding as sufficient for authorship. However as credit hungry folks becomes leaders they circumvent all and every ethical line to get their names on everybody else&amp;#x27;s work whoes paychecks and careers depend on their whims.</text></comment>
<story><title>Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06185-8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tokai</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t surprise me that many of the prolific authors are in medical and life sciences. I have worked with validating registered research at a large hospital (actually a conglomerate of multiple hospitals) and the physicians there had the most &amp;#x27;creative&amp;#x27; ways of registering their research I have ever seen. Interviewed by a journalist? Let&amp;#x27;s put that down as a peer reviewed journal article. It was absolutely jaw dropping some of the things they tried to get way with in order to inflate their publication numbers. I&amp;#x27;m sure that many other tricks are being used, like pressuring students to publish papers and get your name on them without any work, etc. Citation cartels have been uncovered among journals that you wouldn&amp;#x27;t normally think to be predatory, and are indexed by Scopus and&amp;#x2F;or WoS. It would not surprise me the least if publication cartels exists as well, with editors and reviewers agreeing to let anything get published in exchange for returning the favor.</text></comment>