Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

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159 pointssebg144 comments

I 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

I 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?

Not 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?

Are those junior members learning to do Nobel-caliber work or are they learning to pad their CVs by publishing tons of low-impact papers?

Are those the only two options?

Therein lies the rub. It depends a lot on the person. There are tons of tenured professors who kick back and don't do much, and then there are those who can't help but keep working hard. I think the hope is that you will luck into getting some of the latter in your group, so even if training the others might end up a waste, some will end up successful. Kind of like the VC model.

> if even one of the primary authors ends up with Nobel-caliber work once in their career, was that worth it?

It would seem likely that the answer to that is yes, and that none got the prize and it wasn’t worth it.

I think they followed a bell curve. They were all legitimate science - I don't pretend that this was a world leading lab, but it was a decent one and we mostly published in the field's main few journals. I don't believe the volume had any negative impact on the quality, if anything it made it better because metrics being what they are we had good grant money coming in and got good people and equipment.

And as the sibling pointed out, all of us students had great opportunities to write and submit papers and conferences. I had peers in grad school with very conservative supervisors that didn't want to publish very much (I can think of one prof in particular who was undoubtedly a very good researcher and infrequenty published very good papers). This can be a disservice to students who don't get the same experience, and it's an argument for why publication count is a good metric (even though it's obviously flawed)

What field?

Most research amounts to nothing. It’s why they call it research. But we can’t get the 1% of breakthroughs without the 4% of hits, 93% meh’s, and 2% frauds. Not to mention that much published research is mistaken.

Above all, it’s hard (at least in the sciences). So anyone willing to follow the scientific method and package their results into a whitepaper is doing good science. The scientific method is ultimately the only requirement.

The fact that most research, dare I say by definition, has little value is true. The fact that most published papers have no value is also true.

It is also true that some (published) research may go unnoticed and be discovered or rediscovered (much of science is the rediscovery of ideas that were once speculative and then became valuable because of a change in methods, technology, paradigm) later on. It is a rare occurrence, though, which does not justify the hours, money, energy spent on endeavors that everyone knows are, to the greater community of scientists, researchers, and citizens, meaningless and worthless.

But part of the currency used in science is the number of papers, place of publication, citations received and overall impact on the field of the papers, and the deluge of worthless articles and research is a direct effect of the metrics chosen to evaluate scientists.

> The fact that most published papers have no value is also true.

Is that true though? If I'm about to embark on a bit of extensive research, the first bit of that research would be to see if someone else has already done it. If they have, then there's value to me in not having to spend time/money in repeating what someone else has already done. Or it could show me where other things can be tried instead of just repeating. If we know 999 ways on how not to build a light bulb, we can scratch one more method off by seeing what other people have published.

How is that not considered value?

You are referring to the publication of "negative results", which are of course informative, although rarely published due to a bias shown by journal editors and scientists themselves towards "positive results", that is results supporting the hypothesis tested. Negative results are published, yes, but in the context of popular or highly contested hypotheses or models. That's valuable research.

Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers testing hypotheses nobody is interested about, theoretical work that looks like more abstract art than science, p-hacking, work that starts with corrupted, unreliable, badly collected data, and so on. Work that has no value other than that provided to the authors by the fact that they have produced a piece of "scientific currency".

I must say that at least 1/3 of my conspicuous scientific output was of very limited value. Unfortunately, I cannot go back in time and spend my valuable time and energy on more valuable research.

> Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers testing hypotheses nobody is interested about

I broadly agree with you, but this point is probably mistaken in an illuminating way. The path to breakthrough science sometimes passes through uninteresting work. Few scientists were interested in natural selection before Darwin and his contemporary. There are many other examples.

We are talking about different things. We know about speculative research (which I referred to in my first comments), which gets discovered later on because of new methods, technologies, changes of paradigm. It rarely happens, and it makes a "splash" because it is good narrative and it is unlikely. But it happened, no doubt.

I am talking about, just to offer an example, the vast majority of research that is published (please take this as a gross simplification) in journals with impact factors that start with a zero, theoretical work that re-invents linear regression, work based on data collected like a stream collects rain during a storm, that is everything gets in unfiltered.

The justification for thousands and thousands of worthless articles published worldwide every year cannot be, "maybe among them there is the next natural selection-like theory of evolution that will revolutionize our understanding of the world". But unfortunately, left unchecked, scientific production has increased tremendously in volume, and I am quite confident that increase did not lead to an increase in "good science".

Ah. That makes sense. Thank you for the thoughtful point.

The pressure to publish tends to lead to many smaller papers, instead of, say, a longer monograph that collates it. Indeed, multiple publications are often made using parts of the same data-set (given how much effort and cost it is to run a study, there is often an incentive to get more data than less, particularly in the clinical and psychological sciences).

It is unfortunate in many ways (not all).

I’m not sure what to compare against. Of course most research papers don’t amount to much, but are the ones produced by big groups with only a little hands-on work by the professors much worse on average, I wonder?

So I still don't understand why these professors don't have their name second after the student author. It's still prestigious to guiding some of the best minds but also very honest, maybe even have a special symbol to indicate it as such in parenthesis.

I am sure it can be different everywhere, but at least my advisor in grad school was great about making sure the students were ahead of him in the list. The student(s) who were primarily responsible were first and then he would be on it after.

Out of curiosity I checked and he has 161 publications on Google Scholar. Of the publications with multiple authors he is first author on only 7 of them. And then 7 are single author.

This is the standard protocol

In the fields of physics I'm familiar with the group leader is usually listed last on papers. They get credit wherever they are in the author list, while being first or second author carries more cachet for students and postdocs who are trying to establish their careers.

Indeed not surprising at all. Some of our facility people (like sequencing or biobanking) insist that you add them as coauthor if the facility did some work for you

Above board, perhaps.

This way of researching and publish does, OTOH, mean something quite different from science of the past. This isn't applying the method more efficiently. It's applying a different method.

Reading old papers, you know who they were written by. These days, authorship doesn't mean that anymore. It's more like credits in a movie than a signature on a painting.

Don't the credits on a movie imply active participation too? I'd say a closer analogy might be an attendance roll...

I feel like a supervisor who just signed off on things while not “getting his hands dirty” had as much effect on the final paper as craft services does on the final film: not 0, but not really an equal peer.

The supervisor typically has a major hand in choosing a productive research direction. Asking the "right" questions often is what makes research valuable! Also, the supervisor's name is typically last on the paper, and it's clear this is their role.

The nice thing about credits compared to authors is that credits generally have a title/role/position associated with the name. (A grip does a very different job than a costume designer, but with a paper they're all just authors which has a different meaning than say "research director")

It's certainly not perfect (still a bit coarse, doesn't state what % of the work is done, doesn't state which parts of the paper the author worked on), but CRediT statements are gaining increasing traction in the published literature: https://credit.niso.org/

For scientific papers, depending on the field, order of listing actually is some indication of role. I think the convention in bio research is 1st author is the primary creator of the experiment and paper while last author is the lab PI.

Per this science.org column, that seems typical across a number of scientific disciplines. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-navigate-authors....

It’s the same in my field (CS: security and privacy). The most senior people tend to be in the end of the list. The first author is typically a student/postdoc who did the technical leadership on the work, and they get the benefit of getting their name out there in the shorthand citation (“AuthorName, S&P ‘23”).

yes this has been, and continues to be the case from my perspective, for at least the last 50 years.

I'm glad you felt comfortable with that situation, but not all are like that. Sometimes the involvement is very nominal and unnecessary and there can be unintentional side effects that aren't always obvious, in a form of "attribution manipulation." I can think of situations where a researcher is basically "joining" projects whenever possible to attach their name to it in a form of branding. When a junior person comes along with their own original idea, even without the need of the senior person being involved, if the senior person is on the paper that senior person tends to "suck up" undue credit.

I think sometimes the credit is deserved, but there are times when credit for papers tends to gravitate toward certain individuals who are better at managing public perceptions of citations.

Gravity isn't a bad analogy: people with large citation counts tend to accumulate more, and perceived credit gets taken away from other individuals, even if subconsciously. I think it leads to a grossly distorted idea of how credit is distributed.

I suspect this varies a lot but in my experience these large papers with many many researchers involved authorship is very murky in all sorts of ways. People with prominent authorships might not even deserve to be on the paper at all, and people who are lost in the sea might have actually made a significant contribution.

I agree with you. PIs that have their name in so many articles are actually gaming the system.

Nature and Science journals now require author contributions. Administration, fund acquisition, etc. are typically no longer valid to claim authorship. Cell is an exception and does allow this.

So in my experience they simply force other coauthors to give them credit for study design when they did none.

Thanks for putting some realism in the thread. I've been a PhD student and the involvement of the lab head ranged from actually giving some research direction to doing jack shit depending on the paper and the people leading them. It was very obvious once when he green-lighted one of my paper for submission yet wanted to changed half of it when I made an internal presentation about it a week later.

I challenged the thing one time to an intermediate supervisor (who where at least really contributing a bit) and I got bullshit excuses like "he's securing funding", "running the lab"... well at least not for my project since it costed nothing and I came with my own funding. At this point the toilet cleaning lady was contributing more to the paper because of how she allowed me to work in a clean environment.

So I'm not surprised by Japan being over-represented like mentioned in the article. My lab explicit policy was "quantity over quality" written in a presentation given to new student. I know have a mental, logarithmic curve of contributions from authors: first made 90% of the work, second 9% and the following authors share the last 1%.

Reading and providing comments on a paper is secretarial work and not valuable respected scientific work. Any undergrad could do it. There are even companies in some countries that do it well.

You have to contribute substantively to the actual research.

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?

You get down to 100 authors in countries like the US and China? No way. There are 1000+ significant scientists and acheivements easily

This 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.

As 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.

These are mostly people that are bossing other people around, and just review the work occasionally, not actually creating whole drafts.

Most 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.

they don't do any of those tasks though, people who do 50 papers a year are in very senior roles & only mentor, attend a few meetings, read the paper once or twice at best and propose modifications maybe. the question of what constitutes authorship is really more the question here

Michael Stonebraker referred to this as "Diarrhea of papers"

https://www.idug.org/browse/blogs/blogviewer?blogkey=a7b6fe8...

And he more or less says the focus on quantity has made the academic field (databases) irrelevant, because individual papers don't tell you anything useful. (Disclaimer: My interpretation of his talk, and I don't work in that field.)

My interpretation of his claim is it’s no longer a good career move to focus on big-picture research. It’s better to attack problems with narrow scope or superficial impact. Some of those papers are useful, but they’re not the most important problems in practice.

The organization of knowledge production in different fields can be quite, well, different. If you had 2 post-docs and 8 graduate students, and were collaborating with other labs as well, then papers per year would go up.

Are your colleagues just hitting the stimulants hard? Worked for Erdős I guess...

Related.

The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads: https://archive.vn/N6Gvy

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-readi...

World Bank learns most PDFs it produces go unread: https://www.smh.com.au/world/world-bank-learns-most-pdfs-it-...

> 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.

The counts were determined using a web analytics package which presumably can separate crawler downloads from real users.

It'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.

> 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.

"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.

Well, quite obviously the peer reviewers the journal selects can't be from inside the experiment, and are thus frequently less well informed than collaboration members on which bugs in the software to look out for for example.

How well informed is Random Undergrad Co-Author? And why should being informed on something lead to an authorship? To relate again to material purchases, often enough researchers ask the commercial tech support for details on using the equipment or reagents. This still doesn't make the tech support person a co-author.

Please put the goalposts back to where they where when I answered the question about differences between internal and external reviwers.

It definitely feels a little odd. If everyone is an author, then does authorship really matter?

Is authorship broken out in any way? I would think it could be useful to do something like credits on a movie. Here are the writers, the directors, the producers. And then here is the lighting team, and this team worked on these special effects, this other team on these other effects, etc.

Often the core team gets to be the corresponding authors.

To answer your second question: no.

On a few of the biggest experiments the author list is completely flat and alphabetical. From outside the collaborations there's no way to know who actually wrote the paper or did any of the work described therein.

The best argument to keep it this way is that fewer people fight about who gets credit. But anyone with internal access and a bit of experience knows where to look. If you want to verify someone's contribution from the outside, you just have to find one of the other 3000 authors and ask them to do some sleuthing.

Personally I'd answer "no" to your first question too, but that's a bit more subjective and depends on the funding agency. Particle physicists have, for better or worse, thrown a wrench into the whole idea of authorship metrics, but they did so in a way that would benefit them by default: if the funding agency has a publication quota, everyone passes!

Of course this causes a few problems:

- If your funding agency hasn't caught on and you aren't in particle physics, you are effectively being cheated out of a better ranking.

- Many agencies are now disqualifying publications with over 1000 authors, in which case particle physicists get zero publications.

To deal with the second case, it's actually quite common to see smaller groups of scientists from these collaborations writing papers using their own simulated data, as a way to get publications with fewer authors. I would definitely count myself in the group that considers this situation absurd, but that's where we are.

John 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=d...). I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even have time to read most of his own papers.

It 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.

There 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.

> 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?

It 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?

A paper is only a few pages long usually. A read of a paper takes perhaps half an hour. And in that time, you might even be able to check some references, make a few edits, or drop an email to someone to gather some more results for a figure or two.

Doing this once a week seems very reasonable.

Proof reading and correcting typos shouldn’t be considered authoring, but it is what it is.

A close reading of a scientific paper of any consequence does not take half an hour. These days a published paper may typically be only a few pages but it isn't at all uncommon for the paper to be accompanied by 20-50 pages of supplementary text. When I'm asked to review a paper it takes me the better part of a day, at least. If I were a senior author on that paper that would be the bare minimum that I'd consider an acceptable commitment of effort.

It really depends on the field. @londons_explore is right that a lot of papers in some fields can be read in half an hour, or an hour, and sent back with feedback.

"What the heck happened to John Ioannidis?" (about his publications during the Covid epidemic.) https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...

I think the preamble of the article you linked is important for the consideration of others in opening the link:

"John Ioannidis is one of the most published and influential scientists in the world, someone whose skewering of bad medical research we at SBM have frequently lauded over the years. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Since then, Prof. Ioannidis has been publishing dubious studies that minimize the dangers of the coronavirus, shown up in the media to decry “lockdowns,” and, most recently, “punched down”, attacking a graduate student for having criticized him. What happened? Did Prof. Ioannidis change, or was he always like this and I just didn’t see it? Either way, he’s a cautionary tale of how even science watchdogs can fall prey to hubris."

Great find.

That's a reverse dunk, given that he was proven correct.

If he had stated that SARS-CoV-2 would eventually mutate into something as serious as a cold or a flu he would have been correct. This is not what he stated.

Nothing happened to Ioannidis. He did his job as a scientist and said what he thought was right, even when everybody disagreed with him.

So he was wrong? So what? To be a scientist means to blunder a lot. In fact, to be a scientist means to (be willing to) blunder much, much more than everybody else because that is the only way to learn. Science, ultimately, only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong.

Well, he also decided it was appropriate to insult the physical appearance of grad students on twitter who disagreed with him. He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.

Passion is fine and great in all endeavors. Not being able to acknowledge when you are wrong in small or large is the problem. And it's a problem for both passionate and dispassionate people.

One of the earlier researchers on psychopaths was Hervey M. Cleckley. In his book on the topic The Mask of Sanity one of his vignettes of, I believe, "incomplete manifestation of psychopathology" was of a psychologist who gave public lectures on psychopaths, without apparently recognizing that he was almost one of them.

To sum up the parallel, there are two kinds of people who tend to talk the most about any social or personal ill: those who are worried about the ill, and those who are distracting from the fact that they themselves embody it. (Technically this probably overlaps a bit, as ex-alcoholics are often worried about alcoholism, for example.)

I have no idea what incident you are talking about but, from the context, I have no doubt that it is something inconsequential that social media made a big deal about just to have some reason to be outraged at Ioannidis, with whom they were already outraged.

I didn't say you should be outraged. Feel what you want to feel. I list this example where he definitely did more than "his job as a scientist."

To clarify, I didn't say you said I should be outraged. I said that social media made a big deal of something in order for them (its users) to be outraged. That's what social media is all about, yes?

The commenting on personal appearance took place in a peer-reviewed article in which he was sole author. Read the link.

The linked article is 6,848 words, not counting the embedded tweets. Given the low-level content in the first couple paragraphs, and the constant quoting of tweets, I have no reason to read it. Social media is uniformly bullshit and I'm not in the habit of wasting my time with it.

If you would like to send me a link, or other reference, to the "peer reviewed article" in which "the commenting on personal appearance took place" please feel welcome to do so.

Search the original article ( https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j... ) for this text: "This is how Prof. Ioannidis responded in his new paper."

From what I can gather from the published journal article it appears that if these paragraphs of ad hominems were in it they did not survive the review process: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554

Unfortunately I don't know how to find the pre-publication submission.

So he made a mistake and the corrected it?

@anonymouskimmer: I just held my nose and did as you advised, search the article on "sciencebasedmedicine.org" for the phrase you quoted.

I think this is what UncleMeat refers to as "insulting the physical appearance" of grad students who disagreed with him on twitter:

At that time, the name of the Twitter account owner was not obviously visible (the photo showed an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat), but Meyerowitz-Katz seemed to use the Twitter account prolifically to promote his own work and criticize work contradicting his work. The identity of the Health Nerd Twitter account has become transparent now, since the owner has added a photo of him (wearing a T-shirt that writes “Trust me, I am an epidemiologist”).

In summary, what Ioannidis said was that the twitter account showed an image of someone with big glasses and a cat, and that the owner posted a photo of himself wearing a t-shirt with a slogan.

I would like to say that I struggle to find how that is insulting, but in truth I don't struggle at all. That's all happening on twitter where anything anyone says is insulting to someone. I mean, if he had said something along the lines of "what stupid glasses" or "what stupid t-shirt", yeah, that would have been insulting in the real world. But "an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat)" is an insult- how? To whom? The unrecognisable figure? The cat?

So it's just as I said above, as expected. That whole thing was something inconsequential that social media made a huge todo about because it's social media and people are on it when they have nothing to do. I'm on it right now, I guess, and I actually do have things to do, so ttyl.

I don't disagree with you. Some people with social media get riled up on social media. Those without I guess can get riled up in supplementary material. I assume this happened a lot more in the days when journals were basically it for scientific communication (the 17 and 18 hundreds).

Here we go: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554

From the Supporting Information: [Correction added on 5 January 2022 after first online publication: Information including ad hominem comments directed by the author at people critiquing his work was removed by the author from the appendix in Supporting Information during copy editing between Accepted Article and Version of Record versions of this article. For more information about Wiley policy on changes to Accepted Articles please refer to https://authorservices.wiley.com/ethics-guidelines/index.htm...

> He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.

No one did.

That said, despite the serious amount of professional scrutiny and and public harassment he was subject to, I think he made valuable contributions to the conversation around COVID-19 public policy.

He really lowered himself by personally attacking a grad student who opposed him – the very definition of punching down.

Why? He can't criticise his critics, unless they're scientists of his own standing? I don't know who wrote those rules but I don't remember reading them.

The attacks were not substantive, along the lines of how dare you grad student open your mouth to me exalted professor

Are you sure this is not just you painting meaning and intensions on the exchange because of the people involved and preconceived ideas about "exalted professors" snottily dismissing mere grad students etc?

I think I read the biggest part of the appendix in the linked article and it doesn't come across as what you say. It comes across as irrelevant and unnecessary. The passage was put in an appendix but it really belonged in a blog post, or a tweet, but certainly not in a scholarly article. But other than that, it wasn't even particularly vituperative, just indulgent, really.

It certainly wasn't "insult[ing]" as the parent claimed.

And then of course he removed it from the appendix with a note taking responsibility for it. Yet here we are, still talking about it, as if he stabbed someone in the face or ate babies alive, or anyway whatever a scientist's reputation can reasonably be expected to never recover from.

In 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_num...

that'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

Quite true. Though for Erdős, the huge number of coauthors was far more a side-effect of his, um, "extreme itinerant" professional lifestyle.

Also 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.)

Oh, 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.

My A.I. looks at all the cs abstracts posted to arXiv every day, I skim maybe 50 of the abstracts and download maybe 15 PDFs.

I am a little shocked at how many papers are fewer than four double-spaced pages, scarcely more than a tweet if you're trying to explain something that is fundamentally new to people who aren't intimately involved in that exact corner of that exact subfield.

(If my metric for "quality" was "it might frontpage if posted to HN", the superficial characteristics of the paper would be "about 25 pages with a splashy image on the first page" but unfortunately you can't tell that from the abstract, but maybe you can get the number of pages and the content first page without downloading the whole PDF.)

Erdős was also known to habitually take stimulants like benzedrine and ritalin.

I think he was already quite prolific before that started.

IMO, it is a bit of a myth that Adderall will make an already productive person more productive.

However, stimulants do motivate compulsive behaviors and rigid thinking.

That's where it would have helped Erdos. To just do math everyday and never be much interested in other pursuits takes something extra. Even into old age he didn't have anything else on the bucket list.

A lot of people with neurodivergent brains self medicate to function in the world we are in. It is hardly surprising a math prodigy did so.

I would imagine there are many mathematicians who take ritalin, but I don't see them mentioned as being Paul Erdos.

For anyone interested in learning more about Erdos, he has a fascinating life story well told in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman.

It's available for free on Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL354306M/

I 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.

There 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.

A 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.

"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."

This problem is solved in part by most professors only working at undergraduate or Master's awarding institutions. If you limit Ph.D.s to R1s, then you can have big labs with many grad students at equilibrium.

It's solved in another part by having both master's and doctoral students (allowing two* students per career at equilibrium), and by having post-docs (not a student, technically, but still a paper-miller). With a doctor typically now having two or three post-docs during a career this allows for an additional two or three paper-millers per career at equilibrium. And the post-docs are much better at producing papers than the students.

It's solved in third part by exporting Ph.D.s.

It's solved in a fourth part by the less frequent people who have multiple doctorates.

And in a fifth part by incorporating the many more undergraduates in the research and paper producing apparatus.

Is this unsustainable? Yes. And more importantly a bunch of it shouldn't be done. We should be publishing results updates in lieu of full papers, until enough results have accumulated for a good paper. But what have you.

Edit to add a sixth part: Collaborating with a fellow professor who does have a grad student.

* - actually more than two, as there are typically more master's recipients than doctoral recipients.

I found odd they choose not to talk about salami science[0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...

I 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.

So 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

When 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.

But 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/al...

But determining first authorship itself is non-trivial, as different fields and different journals have different conventions and norms.

Yep, not to mention many groups will list new members higher up so they get cred faster

Basically 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.

Here's a quick guide: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=562

This is painfully accurate.

That 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.

Publishing paper is a sort of training for PHD students. That’s why there are many papers but rarely useful

Sure. 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.

It’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.

Some 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.

In 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.

How would you formulate what the problem is and why it is time to do something about it?

I'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

That 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/0mbqwfls21/192...)

Well, 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.

wow, starting to feel like papers are not a good metric for scientific progress. Who would've thought...

I 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"...

Discussed at the time:

Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17970938 - Sept 2018 (41 comments)

If 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.

Not 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.

A 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.

Up next: ScienceGPT

I guess you don't know about SciGen: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

That site gives an Internal Server Error after submitting the form.

This is how many PIs treat their students: as an AI tool with paper writing capabilities.

The upside: soon we can all be PIs!

I 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.

Also here in Canada. Only the US is perfect!!11

obvious /s

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