KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The number of highly prolific scientific authors is continuing to rise.
• Publishing behaviours could be monitored to detect unusual authorship patterns.

The number of extremely productive scientific authors is on the rise and may reflect an increase in “questionable research practices and fraud” – according to John Ioannidis, coauthor of a recent study posted on BioRxiv.

As reported in a Nature News article by Gemma Conroy, the study found that the number of extremely productive authors – defined as those who publish the equivalent of more than 60 papers a year – has almost quadrupled since a previous analysis carried out in 2018. This increase was surprising given that such high productivity levels had started to level off in 2014, said Ioannidis. Based on raw citation counts, extremely productive authors now account for 44% of the 10,000 most-cited authors across all areas of science.

To assess productivity levels in their new study, Ioannidis et al. counted all articles, reviews, and conference papers published between 2000 and 2022 and indexed in Scopus. They identified 12,624 extremely productive physicists (analysed separately due to their unique authorship practices) and 3,191 extremely productive scientists working in other areas. Topping this list was clinical medicine – perhaps unsurprising given that one in three scientists work in this field – which had 678 authors who published the equivalent of a paper at least once every 6 days during 2022.

678 authors working in clinical medicine published the equivalent of a paper at least once every 6 days during 2022.

The preprint authors speculate that a range of possible factors may explain the recent rise in extreme productivity across all research areas, including lax authorship practices, financial incentives, and paper mills. And while acknowledging that some highly prolific authors may be very talented, they caution that “spurious and unethical behaviours may also abound”. They call for unusual authorship patterns of individual scientists, teams, institutions, and countries to be monitored using centralised, standardised databases.

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