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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Holy cow! 1700 publications is one publication every week for 32 years! How could anyone see that number and not realize that it must be a scam?

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I've never seen a number that high in my field, maybe 500 or 600 for the big shots, and even that seems wildly unreasonable to me. Feynman had about 85 peer-reviewed papers over his lifetime, which is less than two per year during his career, which is a very reasonable number.

Authorship and citations are basically academic currency, and as such have undergone inflation just like real currency. Professors get their name on a paper as a form of payment for future or past services to other professors (often related to funding). There's just no incentive for anyone to stop this as far as I can't tell, and appealing to ethical conduct in authorship and citations is not enough.

>"Authorship and citations are basically academic currency, and as such have undergone inflation just like real currency."

Currencies don't just undergo inflation for no reason. Central banks create that situation on purpose to discourage saving.

But the method they use is printing money to move the value of money from those who had it to toward those who get the newly printed money. Same as with academics publications who do that decentralized.

(Another, more-natural (Austrian), cause of inflation is a contracting economy so dollars chase fewer goods.)

If publication of a new article is lowering the value of previous articles that indicates a severe dysfunction (which may indeed by the case).

If understanding/knowledge is being accumulated by a field the new publications should make those that they cite even more valuable, not less like in the case of a fungible currency.

That is from having very many post-docs, and collaborations from other labs, and from managing large projects.

It need not be unlikely. Once you become an acknowledged expert, other people may collaborate with you in parallel. You contribute some of the main ideas, and your co-authors will flesh out and write the paper. I do not see anything wrong in this. Currently, Erdos and Shelah are in the 1100-1300 range. Euler published around 400 pages (or papers? I am not sure) posthumously!

> Euler published around 400 pages (or papers? I am not sure) posthumously!

That sounds like people who are not Euler engaging in dubious behavior.

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