> In our opinion, it is difficult to believe that the majority of authors with excessive rates are able to consistently produce large quantities of high quality or groundbreaking research, with their input to each paper being substantial and within norms of what constitutes co-authorship
Huh, I thought providing the general direction and sanity-checking the results is the norm of what constitutes co-authorship for a top professor.
Also, the guy who does the writing gets to be an author.
I’ve seen many instances of the new post-doc finishing writing up a former PhD student’s research after the student left and had no interest whatsoever in their former project. It’s a thankless job, with all the pains of doing science without the actual good bits. And yet it is necessary, otherwise some good or valuable research would not get published.
> there's no way it's necessary that people do only the shit bits of science as a career.
Right, they don’t do only that, they also have their own projects. Also, even if it’s not very pleasant, it’s good to have more papers early in a career. It helps landing the next position.
Simply securing funding and being a manager does not qualify for authorship (based on the read on multiple journals submission policy). I don't think this is universally observed or even really policed, so it's fairly common to see people who really did not contribute anything (even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback) listed as the last/corresponding author.
> even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback
Depending on the specific nature of the feedback, someone who does something describable as this could be providing anywhere from 0 to 99% of the scientific insight provided by the paper.
Yes. For one of my hosted interns, I was invited to the weekly meeting (the intern was "working for" another team) and asked for insight, before being added to the paper. I had expected to be listed simply for being the intern host but they didn't agree. I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, I think if a PI runs a lab, brings in all the funding for a grad student, and doesn't really get deeply involved, they should still be listed because they provided the environment in which the research could be done, but I've been told this is a controversial opinion.
I'm not sure I understand what it means to be the "intern host" in this context or why that matters for authorship, if the intern was working for another team, and that team was the one working on the paper.
Regardless, if you showed up to a weekly meeting, and provided insight into the data provided, then it does sound like you deserve authorship.
An intern host: I worked in bigtech. i got permission to secure a summer intern (paid by my cost center). I wrote a job description, interviewed candidates, and hired the best one. the intern came to the company, I found a desk for them, I met with them weekly for status reports, and daily to chat about various stuff. In this case, due to my role and its demands, I could not spend time working on interesting research, so instead, I arranged for the intern to work daily with another team that was doing relevant research. I was invited to, and attended, periodic status meetings, occasionally contributing what little knowledge I had (but absolutely no coding or ML engineering). I read the final paper (did not write any of it) and approved and I received authorship credit (as did the intern's PhD advisor, who also did not really contribute much technical stuff, but provided lab space, and a stimulating environment in which to work and learn).
I would have been OK with a simple credit in the paper (an acknowledgement) but after the fact I realized I had been invited to meetings specifically to justify my co-authorship.
I would agree that you were invited specifically to justify giving you co-authorship. As evidenced by the existence of our conversation right now, exactly what level of involvement justifies co-authorship is fuzzy at the margins; whatever their personal views, they were probably doing you a favor by moving your involvement from the fuzzy zone into the hard-to-argue-with zone. Even if everyone directly involved in the paper thinks "being an intern host justifies authorship" the presence of some senior institutional figure who disagrees could cause problems for you.
In general the last author (in CS) is the one managing. I'm sure many a PhD student can tell you that their advisors, who are on every paper they write, have at times provided little to no input (potentially providing negative value, at least with respect to the research topic at hand).
Securing the funding often means writing a research plan that is interesting and convincing enough to be selected for funding in a competitive review process (80–97% rejection rate). The plan usually represents a substantial intellectual contribution that serves as the foundation for derived papers. As long as the people who join the project later don't freeze the planner out of the paper writing process, they'll usually meet all authorship criteria.
I’ve had that happen in notes from an editor telling me that in addition to addressing reviewer comments I should cite a whole bunch of their completely unrelated articles when submitting a revision.
But I have also been a reviewer in a situation where a supposed broad review article for a preeminent journal completely ignores citing a massive amount of relevant prior work (except, conveniently, the authors’ own work, which in many cases was cited over more relevant and important earlier work), including a large number of my own articles.
I doubt it's any comfort but there are so many people who find this story and many like it to be disgraceful. The unfortunate thing is that they clearly aren't the people who run journals or conference committees.
ICMJE guidelines are frequently cited by other publishers, with the caveat that it depends based on the field. (Which makes sense. A "substantial contribution" to the LIGO collaboration might be much less direct than one in ML or field geology.)
> Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
> Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
> Final approval of the version to be published; AND
> 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.
So you are right. The corresponding author who got funding for the postdoc who designed the experiment for the graduate student that supervised undergradutes and wrote the paper would have a pretty tenuous commection to authorship.
But good luck to everyone else in that chain publishing without them.
I've had a professor who complained he hadn't been made co-author of a paper I wrote, despite the fact that he had not even bothered to read it despite me asking multiple times for his feedback.
I asked him to read it and at least give me _some_ feedback before I submitted an extended version of the paper to a journal. I never did. His name never materialized as co-author.
Doesn't sound like you're doing any actual science there. What about the guy feeding the scientists or housing them, what about the government for providing roads and sewage? That's like putting Steve Jobs' name on all the patents that Apple produced.
"Securing the funding" is much closer to the work than "providing roads and sewage".
In most sciences, to actually secure the funding, you need to argue for why the problem is important, why the team has a shot at solving it, and what possible approaches look promising. Then you need to actually advise the team in supporting the work.
I've worked at at least one company where the managers would routinely name themselves as "inventors" on patent applications, where their subordinates were the ones actually doing the "inventing."
If that's all you do then your work is very valuable, but you have no business being a coauthor on any of the papers. The dean of the university also secures funding for the university, hopefully you can see that that doesn't make them a coauthor.
You might as well give Donald Trump coauthorship, then. Actually this could be an excellent idea: if enough scientists kiss his behind in this way Trump might change his mind about supporting large cuts to science funding.
The issue is that this distorts the perception of what a good researcher does. If the goal is simply to stamp your name on as many papers as possible, and have other papers (perhaps your own) cite those papers…. Then we’re pretty far from incentivizing researchers to do something novel.
> Namely, rates on T2 of up to 212 publications per year, and 5792 new coauthors per year, compared to up to 28.3 publications per year and 173 new coauthors per year on NL. This is despite that the NL list is weighted with more senior researchers, often at the pinnacle of their careers – and hence – likely to have higher rates.
Those 200 papers correspond to 4 papers per week, or more than 1 paper every other day for the whole year, weekends and holidays included. Coauthored with thousands of people they'd never published with before. It's a rather incredible rate.
And that's before you have to try and actually write for grant funding, perform any actual substantial research (that took more than 1.5 days), serve as an editor or reviewer to do any of that "peer reviewed" part, go to a conference on your subject, deal with students, teach, or really anything else with academia.
Writing for grant funding alone has already been a big complaint about how long and difficult it can be with limited success rates in a lot of fields. Time constraints of being a reviewer and how much of your own academic time you have to give up has been a major complaint. They're all time consuming. And then a paper / 1.5 days.
Really, from having been in academia for a little while, putting out something well thought out once a month seems rather fast.
Edit: It would interesting as follow-on research to look at the specifics of suspicious cases. What kinds of methods are being used to "game the system." What kinds of exploits are being employed? Are there common patterns among the suspicious crowd?
Why publish 1x when you can publish the same 10x? Copy and paste data from other people's work? "Lorem ipsum" papers that nobody reads? Extensive citation circles where they all cite each other 50x? Graphs / tables that just look like gibberish data? Very obvious LLM use that has many of the common hallmarks and speaking patterns?
im not a scientist but usually browse arXiv preprints, and it was interesting to see a feature that calls out how much similar text to past papers a submission has!
Did not realize that arXiv had that type of feature. May not actually be well known to many others on HN or arXiv. Thanks for noting the feature was even available.
Do you happen to know what they're using for the "similarity?" Might be it's own research subject in and of itself. just identifying similarity and paraphrasing substitution that's fundamentally the same paper. We changed a bunch of words with a paraphrasing tool. Used only as example cause it's the top search result for "paraphrasing text": https://quillbot.com/paraphrasing-tool They're apparently very easily available.
I've no idea and I cannot find any example now, If I recall correctly it was something along the lines of a custom -arXiv note: this paper has 56% text similarity with this other submission.
I checked the similar one, and was the same authors but different titles, gussued it was a case of a draft not getting a revision properly, but didnt double check for the author email beyond the name (it could also be someone impersonating the real authors with fake credentials, i guess)
Looks like the number is off, but is their point any different with 212 papers? I still think that it would be impossible to give any meaningful support to 212 papers in a year. That's a new paper every 1.72 days.
You are correct, in a large number of fields the PI (principal investigator) goes at the end, the big boss of the lab who manages it and often handles funding and the likes. Similar to the C-suite in a company.
This is a social norm sometimes, but it is very much not sufficient for authorship according to the stated criteria at most journals and ethical standards boards. Usually "authorship" is supposed to mean something like "a substantial contribution to the research content and full approval of the published text". For example, at Medical Physics, an author must:
- Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; AND.
- Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND.
- Given final approval of the version to be published.
My eyes were opened when a field called gamification appeared in the early 2010s. In a few years many gamification researchers had tens of thousands of citations, h-indexes nearing hundred. Well, if you think about it they’re gamers, they’ve been grinding their RPG characters, sniping skills and whatnot for thousands of hours. It’s only natural that these guys and girls figure out how to reach the maximum scientific high score.
Some of the gamification researchers are near the top 500 of that 2% list. Now ask yourself, is gamification something that should make you one of the top 500 scientist in the world? I doubt it, but modern science is a citation game. Nothing else.
Gamification as a field of study also reminds me a lot of this video[1] of a talk about tips for game developers. It is very interesting because it is from 2016 which is close to the time period you mentioned. I’m pretty sure this video has been shared on Hacker News a bunch.
reminds me of the fraudulent Ariely and Gino papers that were exposed a year or two ago, where a very common comment was "they're dishonesty researchers, of course they are going to be dishonest".
Interestingly King Fahd University, the affiliate of the two authors, has been accused of buying better metrics by getting successful academics to include the institution in their affiliations.
note that the 2% list is very large, thus most of the scientists are not just the leading edge superstars but also run of the mill scientists and principal investigators.
The authors focus on the citation inflation in younger scientists but that s unfair (it's only 1000 out of the 20000 in the top 10%). The reality is that older established scientists are much more advantaged because the people of their lab are sought after as collaborators , and they autonatically get an authorship as last authors by virtue of being principal investigators, even if they don't even take a look at the paper. It's thus not strange that they get 35+ authorships per year
These researchers compared the publish rates of Stanford Top 2% scientists with comparable Nobel laureates and the rate of publishing among the anomalous researchers was ludicrously higher than their peers at the top of their game - "up to 212 publications per year, and 5792 new coauthors per year, compared to up to 28.3 publications per year and 173 new coauthors per year on NL [nobel laureates]".
Do you have any reason to believe the T2 group is composed of "older established scientists" who are "much more advantaged" than the group of Nobel Laureates? To the tune of 10x the number of publications and 33x coauthorships?
> reason to believe the T2 group is composed of "older established scientists"
there were 1000 academics with < 10 years of career and 19000 with more (in the inflators list). I did not compare their advantage to the nobel scientists but to the younger ones. (Also the nobel laureates are extreme outliers who don't need any more citations to satisfy their ego or funding needs)
Authorship norms in certain fields seem completely broken: a PI shouldn't become an author just for providing money and a lab. Yet unfortunately that's the norm in many fields.
I'm not claiming the money and lab are useless, but just don't call them "authors".
When one publishes something with a grant from the NIH or the European Union or the Bill Gates foundation, they acknowledge the grant, they don't add the NIH or Bill Gates as an author. How is this different?
It's interesting how the observers of this preferential attachment effect have since become, well, very preferentially attached [0]. The scaling and diffusion of ideas is rarely (and unfortunately), equally distributed.
Anyone who's even been adjacent to scientific academia knows that the lead author is typically the advisor to the grad student or post doc that actually did the research and wrote the paper.
In my experience the lead author is always the post doc or grad student who actually did the research and wrote the paper, while the advisor is the last author and they developed the grant to fund both the grad student and post doc. If you collaborate with another lab, their post docs go towards the front behind your name and the advisor goes somewhere at the end. If two people equally wrote a paper they might be 1 and 2 and get an asterisk indicating they are both co first authors. If anyone was involved at all in the work e.g data collection or anyone involved with running an assay they go somewhere in the middle. Perhaps it’s different in other fields
This sounds like a terminological issue. Without further context, I would assume that "lead author" means the last/senior author, not the first/junior author. But I guess that's a life sciences tradition.
"Who actually did the research" is not always an accurate description of the first author. There are plenty of papers, where the last author had already contributed enough to justify authorship before the first author was even hired. You often need to develop the idea and get preliminary results to convince someone to fund the project, before you get the money to hire the first author to work on the idea.
Yep, this is what I learned in Grad school as well. First author is the primary person doing the work typically, then their advisor will be the last, and then you work towards the middle. So names in the middle of a paper typically contribute less than either edge!
When I was a grad student the only time my PI was listed first on a paper was when he actually did most of the work and I just helped with maths. Otherwise the PI was last and the grad students and post docs doing the research up front. People doing data collection or other ancillary work were mentioned in the acknowledgement section at the end.
When the author count is much higher, like in the thousands in high energy physics, there are different norms like listing the authors alphabetically if the paper summarizes many significant achievements.
This varies greatly by discipline and tradition - sometimes even within the same research groups. For example, some people put the senior person / advisor first, some put this person last, some go by alphabet.
In my experience, there is even more variation in the amount of work expected to be put into a publication by said senior person. To put it mildly. ^^
I've seen someone who desperately wanted their nobel laureate PI on their paper but the professor did not put his name on the paper because it was all their idea (even though it was his grant, he reviewed and ok'd the paper, paper was relevant to his lab, and he really spoke effusively at their thesis defense)
It's quite possible that there's a real effect here. But while I've only had time to skim parts of the paper, I don't see any indication of whether the authors have accounted for the different norms in different fields when analyzing their data for potentially fraudulent or deceptive behavior.
Just for example, physics papers produced by large international collaborations (e.g. every single paper from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN) routinely have hundreds of authors (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567): everyone who has made substantial contributions to the design and operation of the facility is listed, as is everyone on the data analysis teams. (My understanding is that people in those specific fields all recognize that "number of citations" is a mostly meaningless number for those involved, and other metrics for productivity are well-known in those communities and routinely used.) I hear that some genomics papers have broken 1000 authors as well.
I could easily imagine that the high end of observed publication numbers and coauthor counts would be dominated by those giant collaborations, even though there is absolutely no attempt to mislead anyone in the process. Can anyone tell from this article to what degree its conclusions might be influenced by this factor?
Isn't this a well-known issue in the academic and research community where researchers include their friends' names on their published work?
Since researchers are rated and measured by the number of published papers they have, many people game the system by exchanging bylines with their friends ... so that it boosts their total number of papers published.
This was one of the ethical dilemmas we had to go through at university some 20 years ago: "Your professor/supervisor tells you to add them to the list of authors on your paper, do you do it?". There's a whole subset of "issues" here, one where you're more likely to be published with the supervisors name on the paper, another where you're travelling to present your paper, but you're not likely to be granted the budget and adding a professors name will almost ensure an all expenses paid trip.
Low hundreds papers doesn't seem impossible, nor does hundreds of collaborators, but it would heavily depend on your work. We see the same in software. Some people seems unrealistically productive, spawning one successful project after another. I would be interested in knowing for how long they can keep up the pace though. There's also the question of the quality of their work.
I was just thinking about the upper bound on how many papers one could publish in a year earlier this morning. Speaking as someone who spent years in Tech and is now in the middle of a Ph.D. program...
Within the current paradigm, where a post-doc gets hired as a new professor and goes about starting the rough equivalent of a single private sector team, at least in my subfield, 15-25 (non-first author publications) a year is an impressive number. And thus the numbers cited in the supplemental materials, the max being 136 papers a year, is strange, and I am pretty sure the author's points about paper mills etc. hold true.
This is the great thing about the "Contributor Roles Taxonomy" system: it provides a lower level of abstraction and gives credit for who did what (idea generation, coding, writing, reviewing, raising the money, etc.) compared with using "a publication" at the unit of measure. It really solves a lot of problems. [1]
But I'd also like to raise another point. People who wind up in Academia tend to go straight from undergrad to grad school (or spend a year being a lab manager in academia) and so most if not all of the systems we use in software development aren't present. Code review, project timeline estimation, building up a lab-wide codebase of functions to speed up repetitive tasks, 360 degree reviews, lab-wide project management software, an org-chart deeper than two (or in rare cases, three) layers, teams with differentiated responsibilities multiple teams, etc. are not the norm. Every so often I hear of one lab here or there that does one or two of these, not all of them. (Though my experience is limited.)
My point is that if one were to apply all of the modern systems used for coordinating groups of people to produce structured forms of writing, etc., then 100 papers a year sans a breadth-vs.-depth tradeoff might just be doable. But note that this is not "100 papers as year" from an individual, it's "100 papers a year from a mid-sized institution." (Six teams of four getting out 1.5 papers a month equates to 108 papers a year, near the maximum cited above.) Bell Labs' publication / patent rate must have been high!
Granted, what I'm saying is not exactly within the current paradigm of how science is done, and might not be possible in a university setting.
It might be good if the author list had a fraction attached to each author for their contribution share. It could be painful to negotiate this but would help with citation inflation.
"Similarly, paper mills – organizations that produce fabricated or low-quality manuscripts for profit – often rely on inflated co-authorship networks to boost the metrics of paying researchers..."
Happens in patents too. At one of my gigs, there was an engineering department that was perpetually being granted patents for their work. The C-level exec that the department laddered up to demanded on being on every patent app, despite having nothing to do with the invention itself.
My boss insisted that we include other team members on our patent apps, even if they were not involved, as a way of improving morale. (It backfired. No one on the team who eas uninvolved wanted a patent they didnt earn. No one who earned the rigjt to be named on the patent app felt it was right to include non-inventors.)
It amazes me how many "high profile" researchers have blatantly fraudulent work.
As an example, take this rather recent ICLR submission that is egregiously plagiarized[0] (I mean attempts to hide the plagiarism are minimal to nonexistent). Clicking on the authors you can view their profiles and you'll find that most authors have several thousand citations and one north of 25k[1]!!!! They also have an i-10 of 400, which is highly abnormal for that citation level while the last author has an i-10 of 126 with only 7.3k citations.
The problem I see here is that there's lots of suspicious activity and clear evidence of fraud, yet little to no action is taken. If anything, it seems we mostly ignore it. The ICLR submission is a bit odd too, since decisions and comments are public, most of the time this happens behind closed doors and we don't observe the evidence. As far as I'm aware, no one is making network graphs to track fraudulent authors. I think we want to sweep it under the rug because at the end of the day our system relies heavily upon trust. Unless we strongly incentivize reproduction we require high trust and we're afraid to acknowledge fraud in the community because we believe it will make more distrust science. But I think in reality, the reluctance to pursue fraud and the reluctance to have high clarity creates more distrust. The truth is that this system poorly scales even before we incorporate the reverse (bureaucratic) incentives.
I think we lost sight of the goals of research and publishing. Publishing exists to facilitate communication among our peers. We publish in venues for two reasons: to improve/error check works and to facilitate social networks. Publish or perish is detrimental as well as the push for highly subjective measures like novelty. I strongly advocate for returning to the old paradigm, where the conditions for publication are: are there any major errors, is there plagiarism, and does the work sufficiently provide evidence for the experimental hypothesis (note: I intentionally do not say "prove".). This system accepts the reality that we cannot sufficiently judge significance. Breakthroughs by definition come from research areas that are under studied. Frequently from directions that had previously been rejected. Unfortunately, this is becoming more common due to the speed in which researchers must publish and exacerbated by the rise in thresholds to get a work published. Many ideas are abandoned not due to evidence that they will not yield progress, but that the belief to achieve "sufficient" evidence would require too much time. While tenure should "resolve" this, it ignores the fact that a tenured professor still has students that must publish as well as they've been working in a very different way for years. And old habits are hard to break.
I think we need to take a hard long look at our system and I suspect we could do so much more if we rebuilt the structure.
There "risk" is to get a lot of "golden parachute" money to leave earlier than their contract says, as a maximum penalty. If there us actual money to pay the company or insurance does it for them.
.
The human network of processes, laws, culture, knowledge established over millennia, which enables those CEOs to be at the top of such valuable companies in the first place was built by billions over time. Those CEOs are not bette than others, or people of the past, they are the same humans. That they now move billions instead of having a small stone axe business for the local tribes is not of their making. They were lucky.
If you want to see someone really earning the hundred million with their own hard work, place them in the middle of nowhere, and with no access to the global human network that they did nothing whatsoever to construct because it was already there.
The value that CEOs and others grab for themselves is not of their making. They are able to have such huge businesses only because a human network in space (the current one) and time (handed forward over time, knowledge and processes and tools). They "deserve" the millions just as much as everybody else. They misuse their superior position in the network, since they sit in places where lots of value not of their own making is going through.
In addition to that, in many important cases they managed to catch all the upside, but let all the failures fall through to be caught be everybody else.
I have nothing whatsoever against true entrepreneurs. I know a few personally! But as you reach the billions, and the top management (instead of direct owners who actually suffer when the company fails to deliver), the justification for the incomes gets more tenuous IMO.
That is one of my big issues with the "Left" - here in Germany their new program includes getting rid of billionaires. It's too simple and too one-dimensional. The diversity of people in such high-value positions is huge, and there are many more dimensions! The left treat it like a one-dimensional scale, starting with a normal person that has a few dollars or Euros, and on that scale and idea of "money" they remain with their arguments. Instead, we have to look at the many many different things all that money actually stands for.
CEO income with their usually much reduced risk compared to owners should not be treated the same, for example and IMHO.
They output 100x more "people wanting to pay them money", that's why they are paid 100x. The same reason an American computer programmer is paid 100x more than an African coal miner in spite of doing much less work.
All human activity is full of scams if you cast your net wide enough. Insofar as academia contains scams, the distinction is that they have a much lower profit margin.
> Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
You look at the bad actors (in this case and others) and see how much money or equivalent they're getting out of their work. My general view is that it's much less than you could obtain with a PhD and similar effort applied to other fields.
The main problem is that the system forces people to present completely unreasonable levels of productivity just to get jobs—not make tenure at Harvard at 32, just to get regular jobs. But this also creates a diffusion of responsibility—if everyone is forced to do it, then no one can call anyone else out. The only ones who conceivably could would be the ones who don’t make it, but who would listen to them?
We’re going to penalize people for publishing too mucn now? Really?
Just want to say that I love Issac Asimov and he wrote a lot of high quality work and people even say that he’s a graphomaniac with a writing compulsion.
I think people’s work should be judged by the output quality not some sort of speed limiting judgment.
This is more like criticizing Asimov for allowing a magazine to be published called "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" where he was not the editor and it was not his magazine.
> Just want to say that I love Issac Asimov and he wrote a lot of high quality work and people even say that he’s a graphomaniac with a writing compulsion.
There is a difference between being prolific and what those people put out. At least one order of magnitude. Isaac Asimov did not write 80 novels each year.
Isaac Asimov's work was judged by how many people published it, and how many people bought it. There's no equivalent quality control for these papers; it's much more the honour system.
https://archive.ph/SnYjB
> In our opinion, it is difficult to believe that the majority of authors with excessive rates are able to consistently produce large quantities of high quality or groundbreaking research, with their input to each paper being substantial and within norms of what constitutes co-authorship
Huh, I thought providing the general direction and sanity-checking the results is the norm of what constitutes co-authorship for a top professor.
My stance is at least one full concept or one data point or else no authorship to that person.
Also, the guy who does the writing gets to be an author.
I’ve seen many instances of the new post-doc finishing writing up a former PhD student’s research after the student left and had no interest whatsoever in their former project. It’s a thankless job, with all the pains of doing science without the actual good bits. And yet it is necessary, otherwise some good or valuable research would not get published.
disagree. there's no way it's necessary that people do only the shit bits of science as a career.
then again, there's such a thing as a career as a janitor, clearning shit for life... all jobs are dignified BUT not all jobs make careers
> there's no way it's necessary that people do only the shit bits of science as a career.
Right, they don’t do only that, they also have their own projects. Also, even if it’s not very pleasant, it’s good to have more papers early in a career. It helps landing the next position.
> the shit bits of science as a career
I think op was referring to the hard work and effort that's involved.
What if you’re the guy who is keeping the lab running, ie the guy who is securing the funding?
Simply securing funding and being a manager does not qualify for authorship (based on the read on multiple journals submission policy). I don't think this is universally observed or even really policed, so it's fairly common to see people who really did not contribute anything (even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback) listed as the last/corresponding author.
> even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback
Depending on the specific nature of the feedback, someone who does something describable as this could be providing anywhere from 0 to 99% of the scientific insight provided by the paper.
Yes. For one of my hosted interns, I was invited to the weekly meeting (the intern was "working for" another team) and asked for insight, before being added to the paper. I had expected to be listed simply for being the intern host but they didn't agree. I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, I think if a PI runs a lab, brings in all the funding for a grad student, and doesn't really get deeply involved, they should still be listed because they provided the environment in which the research could be done, but I've been told this is a controversial opinion.
I'm not sure I understand what it means to be the "intern host" in this context or why that matters for authorship, if the intern was working for another team, and that team was the one working on the paper.
Regardless, if you showed up to a weekly meeting, and provided insight into the data provided, then it does sound like you deserve authorship.
An intern host: I worked in bigtech. i got permission to secure a summer intern (paid by my cost center). I wrote a job description, interviewed candidates, and hired the best one. the intern came to the company, I found a desk for them, I met with them weekly for status reports, and daily to chat about various stuff. In this case, due to my role and its demands, I could not spend time working on interesting research, so instead, I arranged for the intern to work daily with another team that was doing relevant research. I was invited to, and attended, periodic status meetings, occasionally contributing what little knowledge I had (but absolutely no coding or ML engineering). I read the final paper (did not write any of it) and approved and I received authorship credit (as did the intern's PhD advisor, who also did not really contribute much technical stuff, but provided lab space, and a stimulating environment in which to work and learn).
I would have been OK with a simple credit in the paper (an acknowledgement) but after the fact I realized I had been invited to meetings specifically to justify my co-authorship.
Gotcha.
I would agree that you were invited specifically to justify giving you co-authorship. As evidenced by the existence of our conversation right now, exactly what level of involvement justifies co-authorship is fuzzy at the margins; whatever their personal views, they were probably doing you a favor by moving your involvement from the fuzzy zone into the hard-to-argue-with zone. Even if everyone directly involved in the paper thinks "being an intern host justifies authorship" the presence of some senior institutional figure who disagrees could cause problems for you.
Surely the dean and the provost deserve to be listed then too?
In general the last author (in CS) is the one managing. I'm sure many a PhD student can tell you that their advisors, who are on every paper they write, have at times provided little to no input (potentially providing negative value, at least with respect to the research topic at hand).
Securing the funding often means writing a research plan that is interesting and convincing enough to be selected for funding in a competitive review process (80–97% rejection rate). The plan usually represents a substantial intellectual contribution that serves as the foundation for derived papers. As long as the people who join the project later don't freeze the planner out of the paper writing process, they'll usually meet all authorship criteria.
Which should be treated as misconduct.
Folks who do this should be shunned by their peers and driven out of academia. It's exploitative and coercive.
Not as exploitative as the anonymous reviewer report that asked to add 15 additional papers to our lit review ... all by the same author.
I’ve had that happen in notes from an editor telling me that in addition to addressing reviewer comments I should cite a whole bunch of their completely unrelated articles when submitting a revision.
But I have also been a reviewer in a situation where a supposed broad review article for a preeminent journal completely ignores citing a massive amount of relevant prior work (except, conveniently, the authors’ own work, which in many cases was cited over more relevant and important earlier work), including a large number of my own articles.
I doubt it's any comfort but there are so many people who find this story and many like it to be disgraceful. The unfortunate thing is that they clearly aren't the people who run journals or conference committees.
Unfortunately people like that tend to run academia.
ICMJE guidelines are frequently cited by other publishers, with the caveat that it depends based on the field. (Which makes sense. A "substantial contribution" to the LIGO collaboration might be much less direct than one in ML or field geology.)
> Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
> Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
> Final approval of the version to be published; AND
> 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.
So you are right. The corresponding author who got funding for the postdoc who designed the experiment for the graduate student that supervised undergradutes and wrote the paper would have a pretty tenuous commection to authorship.
But good luck to everyone else in that chain publishing without them.
Ref: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-respo...
I've had a professor who complained he hadn't been made co-author of a paper I wrote, despite the fact that he had not even bothered to read it despite me asking multiple times for his feedback.
I asked him to read it and at least give me _some_ feedback before I submitted an extended version of the paper to a journal. I never did. His name never materialized as co-author.
sounds fair, fuck that guy
Doesn't sound like you're doing any actual science there. What about the guy feeding the scientists or housing them, what about the government for providing roads and sewage? That's like putting Steve Jobs' name on all the patents that Apple produced.
"Securing the funding" is much closer to the work than "providing roads and sewage".
In most sciences, to actually secure the funding, you need to argue for why the problem is important, why the team has a shot at solving it, and what possible approaches look promising. Then you need to actually advise the team in supporting the work.
Did they? (Put his name in all of Apples patents?)
Steve Jobs has 1114 patents. Apple has 16240.
so yes.
I've worked at at least one company where the managers would routinely name themselves as "inventors" on patent applications, where their subordinates were the ones actually doing the "inventing."
I've worked at one, too.
That felt... disheartening.
But also the best motivator to stop selling your brain to heartless corps and go build your own stuff
Building my own stuff: definitely.
Doing all the admin work, all the capital raising, etc. needed to build my own stuff: I suspect that this would kill me.
Joining a nice startup: been there, done that... will do it again :)
The true incubators are the ones that you where inside all too long
If that's all you do then your work is very valuable, but you have no business being a coauthor on any of the papers. The dean of the university also secures funding for the university, hopefully you can see that that doesn't make them a coauthor.
Thank them in the acknowledgements.
You might as well give Donald Trump coauthorship, then. Actually this could be an excellent idea: if enough scientists kiss his behind in this way Trump might change his mind about supporting large cuts to science funding.
Trump has that "you want to be the last person to leave the room" type though, as that's as much as he cares to remember if even.
The issue is that this distorts the perception of what a good researcher does. If the goal is simply to stamp your name on as many papers as possible, and have other papers (perhaps your own) cite those papers…. Then we’re pretty far from incentivizing researchers to do something novel.
Do you think any one person can provide direction and sanity-check the work of more than 5,000 papers in a year? I don't.
Where did you get the 5000 number?
From the research paper that the article is discussing.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08989621.2024.2...
> Namely, rates on T2 of up to 212 publications per year, and 5792 new coauthors per year, compared to up to 28.3 publications per year and 173 new coauthors per year on NL. This is despite that the NL list is weighted with more senior researchers, often at the pinnacle of their careers – and hence – likely to have higher rates.
That is 212 papers, not 5000. 5000 is the number of new authors of those 200 papers.
Those 200 papers correspond to 4 papers per week, or more than 1 paper every other day for the whole year, weekends and holidays included. Coauthored with thousands of people they'd never published with before. It's a rather incredible rate.
And that's before you have to try and actually write for grant funding, perform any actual substantial research (that took more than 1.5 days), serve as an editor or reviewer to do any of that "peer reviewed" part, go to a conference on your subject, deal with students, teach, or really anything else with academia.
Writing for grant funding alone has already been a big complaint about how long and difficult it can be with limited success rates in a lot of fields. Time constraints of being a reviewer and how much of your own academic time you have to give up has been a major complaint. They're all time consuming. And then a paper / 1.5 days.
Really, from having been in academia for a little while, putting out something well thought out once a month seems rather fast.
Edit: It would interesting as follow-on research to look at the specifics of suspicious cases. What kinds of methods are being used to "game the system." What kinds of exploits are being employed? Are there common patterns among the suspicious crowd?
Why publish 1x when you can publish the same 10x? Copy and paste data from other people's work? "Lorem ipsum" papers that nobody reads? Extensive citation circles where they all cite each other 50x? Graphs / tables that just look like gibberish data? Very obvious LLM use that has many of the common hallmarks and speaking patterns?
im not a scientist but usually browse arXiv preprints, and it was interesting to see a feature that calls out how much similar text to past papers a submission has!
Did not realize that arXiv had that type of feature. May not actually be well known to many others on HN or arXiv. Thanks for noting the feature was even available.
Do you happen to know what they're using for the "similarity?" Might be it's own research subject in and of itself. just identifying similarity and paraphrasing substitution that's fundamentally the same paper. We changed a bunch of words with a paraphrasing tool. Used only as example cause it's the top search result for "paraphrasing text": https://quillbot.com/paraphrasing-tool They're apparently very easily available.
I've no idea and I cannot find any example now, If I recall correctly it was something along the lines of a custom -arXiv note: this paper has 56% text similarity with this other submission.
I checked the similar one, and was the same authors but different titles, gussued it was a case of a draft not getting a revision properly, but didnt double check for the author email beyond the name (it could also be someone impersonating the real authors with fake credentials, i guess)
but i think it was a revision!
if i find it again ill comment back here
Yeah, you're listing some of the reasons I left academia.
Looks like the number is off, but is their point any different with 212 papers? I still think that it would be impossible to give any meaningful support to 212 papers in a year. That's a new paper every 1.72 days.
You are correct, in a large number of fields the PI (principal investigator) goes at the end, the big boss of the lab who manages it and often handles funding and the likes. Similar to the C-suite in a company.
This is a social norm sometimes, but it is very much not sufficient for authorship according to the stated criteria at most journals and ethical standards boards. Usually "authorship" is supposed to mean something like "a substantial contribution to the research content and full approval of the published text". For example, at Medical Physics, an author must:
- Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; AND.
- Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND.
- Given final approval of the version to be published.
My eyes were opened when a field called gamification appeared in the early 2010s. In a few years many gamification researchers had tens of thousands of citations, h-indexes nearing hundred. Well, if you think about it they’re gamers, they’ve been grinding their RPG characters, sniping skills and whatnot for thousands of hours. It’s only natural that these guys and girls figure out how to reach the maximum scientific high score.
Some of the gamification researchers are near the top 500 of that 2% list. Now ask yourself, is gamification something that should make you one of the top 500 scientist in the world? I doubt it, but modern science is a citation game. Nothing else.
Gamification as a field of study also reminds me a lot of this video[1] of a talk about tips for game developers. It is very interesting because it is from 2016 which is close to the time period you mentioned. I’m pretty sure this video has been shared on Hacker News a bunch.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4
That feels like a certain xkcd [0]. If you can game the totally bullshit rankings then clearly your papers are worth something.
[0] https://xkcd.com/2385/
Thought that was going to be https://xkcd.com/125/. Iteration of the same concept I guess.
reminds me of the fraudulent Ariely and Gino papers that were exposed a year or two ago, where a very common comment was "they're dishonesty researchers, of course they are going to be dishonest".
Interestingly King Fahd University, the affiliate of the two authors, has been accused of buying better metrics by getting successful academics to include the institution in their affiliations.
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-12-05/dozens-of...
note that the 2% list is very large, thus most of the scientists are not just the leading edge superstars but also run of the mill scientists and principal investigators.
The authors focus on the citation inflation in younger scientists but that s unfair (it's only 1000 out of the 20000 in the top 10%). The reality is that older established scientists are much more advantaged because the people of their lab are sought after as collaborators , and they autonatically get an authorship as last authors by virtue of being principal investigators, even if they don't even take a look at the paper. It's thus not strange that they get 35+ authorships per year
These researchers compared the publish rates of Stanford Top 2% scientists with comparable Nobel laureates and the rate of publishing among the anomalous researchers was ludicrously higher than their peers at the top of their game - "up to 212 publications per year, and 5792 new coauthors per year, compared to up to 28.3 publications per year and 173 new coauthors per year on NL [nobel laureates]".
Do you have any reason to believe the T2 group is composed of "older established scientists" who are "much more advantaged" than the group of Nobel Laureates? To the tune of 10x the number of publications and 33x coauthorships?
> reason to believe the T2 group is composed of "older established scientists"
there were 1000 academics with < 10 years of career and 19000 with more (in the inflators list). I did not compare their advantage to the nobel scientists but to the younger ones. (Also the nobel laureates are extreme outliers who don't need any more citations to satisfy their ego or funding needs)
Authorship norms in certain fields seem completely broken: a PI shouldn't become an author just for providing money and a lab. Yet unfortunately that's the norm in many fields.
> a PI shouldn't become an author just for providing money and a lab.
What have the romans ever given us?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
I'm not claiming the money and lab are useless, but just don't call them "authors".
When one publishes something with a grant from the NIH or the European Union or the Bill Gates foundation, they acknowledge the grant, they don't add the NIH or Bill Gates as an author. How is this different?
It's interesting how the observers of this preferential attachment effect have since become, well, very preferentially attached [0]. The scaling and diffusion of ideas is rarely (and unfortunately), equally distributed.
[0]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Emergence+of+scaling+in...
This is pretty much what I came here to post.
Anyone who's even been adjacent to scientific academia knows that the lead author is typically the advisor to the grad student or post doc that actually did the research and wrote the paper.
In my experience the lead author is always the post doc or grad student who actually did the research and wrote the paper, while the advisor is the last author and they developed the grant to fund both the grad student and post doc. If you collaborate with another lab, their post docs go towards the front behind your name and the advisor goes somewhere at the end. If two people equally wrote a paper they might be 1 and 2 and get an asterisk indicating they are both co first authors. If anyone was involved at all in the work e.g data collection or anyone involved with running an assay they go somewhere in the middle. Perhaps it’s different in other fields
This sounds like a terminological issue. Without further context, I would assume that "lead author" means the last/senior author, not the first/junior author. But I guess that's a life sciences tradition.
"Who actually did the research" is not always an accurate description of the first author. There are plenty of papers, where the last author had already contributed enough to justify authorship before the first author was even hired. You often need to develop the idea and get preliminary results to convince someone to fund the project, before you get the money to hire the first author to work on the idea.
Yep, this is what I learned in Grad school as well. First author is the primary person doing the work typically, then their advisor will be the last, and then you work towards the middle. So names in the middle of a paper typically contribute less than either edge!
When I was a grad student the only time my PI was listed first on a paper was when he actually did most of the work and I just helped with maths. Otherwise the PI was last and the grad students and post docs doing the research up front. People doing data collection or other ancillary work were mentioned in the acknowledgement section at the end.
When the author count is much higher, like in the thousands in high energy physics, there are different norms like listing the authors alphabetically if the paper summarizes many significant achievements.
In the in-between author order is negotiated.
This varies greatly by discipline and tradition - sometimes even within the same research groups. For example, some people put the senior person / advisor first, some put this person last, some go by alphabet.
In my experience, there is even more variation in the amount of work expected to be put into a publication by said senior person. To put it mildly. ^^
...and imagine how well it would go over for a grad student to say "actually Dr Advisor, you don't meet the criteria for authorship"
I've seen someone who desperately wanted their nobel laureate PI on their paper but the professor did not put his name on the paper because it was all their idea (even though it was his grant, he reviewed and ok'd the paper, paper was relevant to his lab, and he really spoke effusively at their thesis defense)
If you scrutinize the top publishers, I'm sure you'll find some duplicate publications, salami slicing, and other things.
When you're that prolific, the number of publications also become a goal, especially if you're awarded for it.
Maybe not outright academic fraud, but at least publishing pattern that tries to maximize some measure(s).
It's quite possible that there's a real effect here. But while I've only had time to skim parts of the paper, I don't see any indication of whether the authors have accounted for the different norms in different fields when analyzing their data for potentially fraudulent or deceptive behavior.
Just for example, physics papers produced by large international collaborations (e.g. every single paper from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN) routinely have hundreds of authors (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567): everyone who has made substantial contributions to the design and operation of the facility is listed, as is everyone on the data analysis teams. (My understanding is that people in those specific fields all recognize that "number of citations" is a mostly meaningless number for those involved, and other metrics for productivity are well-known in those communities and routinely used.) I hear that some genomics papers have broken 1000 authors as well.
I could easily imagine that the high end of observed publication numbers and coauthor counts would be dominated by those giant collaborations, even though there is absolutely no attempt to mislead anyone in the process. Can anyone tell from this article to what degree its conclusions might be influenced by this factor?
Isn't this a well-known issue in the academic and research community where researchers include their friends' names on their published work?
Since researchers are rated and measured by the number of published papers they have, many people game the system by exchanging bylines with their friends ... so that it boosts their total number of papers published.
This was one of the ethical dilemmas we had to go through at university some 20 years ago: "Your professor/supervisor tells you to add them to the list of authors on your paper, do you do it?". There's a whole subset of "issues" here, one where you're more likely to be published with the supervisors name on the paper, another where you're travelling to present your paper, but you're not likely to be granted the budget and adding a professors name will almost ensure an all expenses paid trip.
Low hundreds papers doesn't seem impossible, nor does hundreds of collaborators, but it would heavily depend on your work. We see the same in software. Some people seems unrealistically productive, spawning one successful project after another. I would be interested in knowing for how long they can keep up the pace though. There's also the question of the quality of their work.
I wonder how many of these papers are now mostly if not completely AI-generated.
This happened a year ago, and only gained attention because it was bad enough to be noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39391034
The 10x scientists.
To be fair, there has always been extreme outliers in scientific output, like Gauss and Euler.
I was just thinking about the upper bound on how many papers one could publish in a year earlier this morning. Speaking as someone who spent years in Tech and is now in the middle of a Ph.D. program...
Within the current paradigm, where a post-doc gets hired as a new professor and goes about starting the rough equivalent of a single private sector team, at least in my subfield, 15-25 (non-first author publications) a year is an impressive number. And thus the numbers cited in the supplemental materials, the max being 136 papers a year, is strange, and I am pretty sure the author's points about paper mills etc. hold true.
This is the great thing about the "Contributor Roles Taxonomy" system: it provides a lower level of abstraction and gives credit for who did what (idea generation, coding, writing, reviewing, raising the money, etc.) compared with using "a publication" at the unit of measure. It really solves a lot of problems. [1]
[1] https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Au...
But I'd also like to raise another point. People who wind up in Academia tend to go straight from undergrad to grad school (or spend a year being a lab manager in academia) and so most if not all of the systems we use in software development aren't present. Code review, project timeline estimation, building up a lab-wide codebase of functions to speed up repetitive tasks, 360 degree reviews, lab-wide project management software, an org-chart deeper than two (or in rare cases, three) layers, teams with differentiated responsibilities multiple teams, etc. are not the norm. Every so often I hear of one lab here or there that does one or two of these, not all of them. (Though my experience is limited.)
My point is that if one were to apply all of the modern systems used for coordinating groups of people to produce structured forms of writing, etc., then 100 papers a year sans a breadth-vs.-depth tradeoff might just be doable. But note that this is not "100 papers as year" from an individual, it's "100 papers a year from a mid-sized institution." (Six teams of four getting out 1.5 papers a month equates to 108 papers a year, near the maximum cited above.) Bell Labs' publication / patent rate must have been high!
Granted, what I'm saying is not exactly within the current paradigm of how science is done, and might not be possible in a university setting.
More people need to read the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Fictions
Then this wouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
It might be good if the author list had a fraction attached to each author for their contribution share. It could be painful to negotiate this but would help with citation inflation.
So, who is the worst? Is there someone pumping out multiple new papers per day?
From the article:
"Similarly, paper mills – organizations that produce fabricated or low-quality manuscripts for profit – often rely on inflated co-authorship networks to boost the metrics of paying researchers..."
The article references this paper on predatory journals as the source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2?...
According to this paper more than 75% of the authors published in these journals originate in India and Africa (mostly Nigeria).
Among given population X% are suspicious and Y% keep an eye on statistic and their heads below the radar.
Happens in patents too. At one of my gigs, there was an engineering department that was perpetually being granted patents for their work. The C-level exec that the department laddered up to demanded on being on every patent app, despite having nothing to do with the invention itself.
My boss insisted that we include other team members on our patent apps, even if they were not involved, as a way of improving morale. (It backfired. No one on the team who eas uninvolved wanted a patent they didnt earn. No one who earned the rigjt to be named on the patent app felt it was right to include non-inventors.)
I wish the incentives would flip from “publish” to “reproduce” at this point.
Or some 50/50 split. Obviously we need new studies. But the f they don’t replicate, what’s the point?
Hopefully Trump changes these incentive structures.
It amazes me how many "high profile" researchers have blatantly fraudulent work.
As an example, take this rather recent ICLR submission that is egregiously plagiarized[0] (I mean attempts to hide the plagiarism are minimal to nonexistent). Clicking on the authors you can view their profiles and you'll find that most authors have several thousand citations and one north of 25k[1]!!!! They also have an i-10 of 400, which is highly abnormal for that citation level while the last author has an i-10 of 126 with only 7.3k citations.
The problem I see here is that there's lots of suspicious activity and clear evidence of fraud, yet little to no action is taken. If anything, it seems we mostly ignore it. The ICLR submission is a bit odd too, since decisions and comments are public, most of the time this happens behind closed doors and we don't observe the evidence. As far as I'm aware, no one is making network graphs to track fraudulent authors. I think we want to sweep it under the rug because at the end of the day our system relies heavily upon trust. Unless we strongly incentivize reproduction we require high trust and we're afraid to acknowledge fraud in the community because we believe it will make more distrust science. But I think in reality, the reluctance to pursue fraud and the reluctance to have high clarity creates more distrust. The truth is that this system poorly scales even before we incorporate the reverse (bureaucratic) incentives.
I think we lost sight of the goals of research and publishing. Publishing exists to facilitate communication among our peers. We publish in venues for two reasons: to improve/error check works and to facilitate social networks. Publish or perish is detrimental as well as the push for highly subjective measures like novelty. I strongly advocate for returning to the old paradigm, where the conditions for publication are: are there any major errors, is there plagiarism, and does the work sufficiently provide evidence for the experimental hypothesis (note: I intentionally do not say "prove".). This system accepts the reality that we cannot sufficiently judge significance. Breakthroughs by definition come from research areas that are under studied. Frequently from directions that had previously been rejected. Unfortunately, this is becoming more common due to the speed in which researchers must publish and exacerbated by the rise in thresholds to get a work published. Many ideas are abandoned not due to evidence that they will not yield progress, but that the belief to achieve "sufficient" evidence would require too much time. While tenure should "resolve" this, it ignores the fact that a tenured professor still has students that must publish as well as they've been working in a very different way for years. And old habits are hard to break.
I think we need to take a hard long look at our system and I suspect we could do so much more if we rebuilt the structure.
[0] https://openreview.net/forum?id=cIKQp84vqN
[1] https://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?user=D-TS1fAAAAAJ
[flagged]
Firing a shitload of people at random makes it more difficult to root out these things, not less.
cool, will it do anything about CEOs which earn 100x what a common employee earns, despite not outputting 100x?
Happily, yes. They will now earn 10,000x what a common employee earns while doing less than ever before.
In many (traditional) companies, a CEO's mistake can easily cause 100x more harm than an average worker's mistake.
That would be relevant if it was the CEO taking the risk but that is not really true in what feels like the vast majority of cases.
And when that happens, what happens to them?
There "risk" is to get a lot of "golden parachute" money to leave earlier than their contract says, as a maximum penalty. If there us actual money to pay the company or insurance does it for them.
.
The human network of processes, laws, culture, knowledge established over millennia, which enables those CEOs to be at the top of such valuable companies in the first place was built by billions over time. Those CEOs are not bette than others, or people of the past, they are the same humans. That they now move billions instead of having a small stone axe business for the local tribes is not of their making. They were lucky.
If you want to see someone really earning the hundred million with their own hard work, place them in the middle of nowhere, and with no access to the global human network that they did nothing whatsoever to construct because it was already there.
The value that CEOs and others grab for themselves is not of their making. They are able to have such huge businesses only because a human network in space (the current one) and time (handed forward over time, knowledge and processes and tools). They "deserve" the millions just as much as everybody else. They misuse their superior position in the network, since they sit in places where lots of value not of their own making is going through.
In addition to that, in many important cases they managed to catch all the upside, but let all the failures fall through to be caught be everybody else.
I have nothing whatsoever against true entrepreneurs. I know a few personally! But as you reach the billions, and the top management (instead of direct owners who actually suffer when the company fails to deliver), the justification for the incomes gets more tenuous IMO.
That is one of my big issues with the "Left" - here in Germany their new program includes getting rid of billionaires. It's too simple and too one-dimensional. The diversity of people in such high-value positions is huge, and there are many more dimensions! The left treat it like a one-dimensional scale, starting with a normal person that has a few dollars or Euros, and on that scale and idea of "money" they remain with their arguments. Instead, we have to look at the many many different things all that money actually stands for.
CEO income with their usually much reduced risk compared to owners should not be treated the same, for example and IMHO.
They output 100x more "people wanting to pay them money", that's why they are paid 100x. The same reason an American computer programmer is paid 100x more than an African coal miner in spite of doing much less work.
Academia is filled to the absolute brim with scams, news at 11.
(I'm in academia)
All human activity is full of scams if you cast your net wide enough. Insofar as academia contains scams, the distinction is that they have a much lower profit margin.
> Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
How does one compute the profit margin of academia?
You look at the bad actors (in this case and others) and see how much money or equivalent they're getting out of their work. My general view is that it's much less than you could obtain with a PhD and similar effort applied to other fields.
The main problem is that the system forces people to present completely unreasonable levels of productivity just to get jobs—not make tenure at Harvard at 32, just to get regular jobs. But this also creates a diffusion of responsibility—if everyone is forced to do it, then no one can call anyone else out. The only ones who conceivably could would be the ones who don’t make it, but who would listen to them?
Got a citation for that, academic?
Yet they still demand we take them with utmost seriousness...
not really, maybe you're thinking of medical doctors
We’re going to penalize people for publishing too mucn now? Really?
Just want to say that I love Issac Asimov and he wrote a lot of high quality work and people even say that he’s a graphomaniac with a writing compulsion.
I think people’s work should be judged by the output quality not some sort of speed limiting judgment.
This is more like criticizing Asimov for allowing a magazine to be published called "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" where he was not the editor and it was not his magazine.
> Just want to say that I love Issac Asimov and he wrote a lot of high quality work and people even say that he’s a graphomaniac with a writing compulsion.
There is a difference between being prolific and what those people put out. At least one order of magnitude. Isaac Asimov did not write 80 novels each year.
Isaac Asimov wroted/edited ~500 books over his life.
Some of the people mentioned in the research are coauthoring ~200 paper a year.
I don't think Isaac would be in the same league as those mentioned in this paper.
Isaac Asimov's work was judged by how many people published it, and how many people bought it. There's no equivalent quality control for these papers; it's much more the honour system.