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

Authorship Norms and PI Credit

• Commenters note that being in the “top 2%” is not only superstars but many ordinary PIs who accrue authorships by default.
• Common pattern in many lab sciences: first author = grad student/postdoc doing most hands‑on work; last author = PI who got the grant and runs the lab; middle authors = varying levels of contribution.
• Some fields reverse or ignore this (senior first, alphabetical ordering), making cross-field comparisons tricky.
• Strong disagreement on whether “providing funding, lab, and light supervision” merits authorship; some see it as essential intellectual input, others say it clearly violates stated journal criteria and should be only in acknowledgements.

Plausibility of Extreme Output

• Numbers like ~200 papers/year (≈1 paper every 1.5–2 days) and thousands of new coauthors/year are widely viewed as incompatible with meaningful oversight, given other duties (grant writing, teaching, reviewing, conferences).
• A few argue that with industrial-style organization and division of labor, a mid-sized institution could legitimately produce ~100 papers/year, but even then this refers to teams, not individuals.
• Historical “10x geniuses” (Gauss, Euler, Asimov) are raised and dismissed as being at least an order of magnitude less prolific than the most extreme modern cases.

Gaming Metrics, Fraud, and Paper Mills

• Many see this as part of a broader ecosystem: honorary authorship for bosses, citation cartels, salami-slicing, duplicate and plagiarized work, and paper mills (especially in predatory journals).
• Examples mentioned include editors/reviewers demanding self-citations and blatantly plagiarized submissions from seemingly “high-profile” researchers.
• Some suspect growing use of LLMs and text paraphrasing tools to mass-generate papers.

Perverse Incentives and Possible Reforms

• “Publish or perish” and citation-based rankings are described as turning science into a “citation game,” especially in trendy fields (e.g., gamification).
• Suggestions: shift incentives toward replication, adopt contributor taxonomies (CRediT) or fractional contribution scores, enforce ethical authorship criteria, and more aggressively investigate suspicious publication patterns.
• Several argue that without systemic change, inflated authorship and low-quality output will continue to distort what it means to be a “top” scientist.