Among world’s top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds

About 10% of the most influential researchers worldwide in various scientific fields, including chemistry, are achieving ‘implausibly high’ publication and new co-author rates. Many are producing hundreds of papers each year and gaining hundreds to thousands of new collaborators annually, according to recent analysis by researchers at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia.

Geoscientists Peter Mora and Simone Pilia found that an increasing number of researchers – about 20,000 out of the roughly 200,000 scientists on Stanford’s ‘Top 2%’ researcher list – are producing ‘anomalously high publication and co-authorship metrics’, indicating efforts to inflate their publication metrics. Roughly 1000 of these individuals have worked in academia for a decade or less, which indicates that these practices are emerging even at early career stages, the authors of the analysis noted. They argue that early-career researchers ‘exemplify the systemic incentive structures that encourage metric inflation across career stages’.

Mora and Pilia also examined the publication and co-authorship rates of 462 Nobel laureates in chemistry, physics, medicine and economics, and found similar results in terms of publication and new co-author rates, which tail off above threshold values of around 20 publications per year and 35 new co-authors annually.

Looking ahead, they argue that further research is needed to better understand the conditions where the quantity of research might affect its quality. However, they suggest that at ‘excessive rates’ these cases likely result from ‘paper pumping’ and low quality or unethical co-author practices such as co-author and citation networks. ‘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,’ the researchers conclude. Mora and Pilia propose renormalising research metrics to remove the incentive for researchers to prioritise quantity or resort to unethical practices to boost their metrics.