Surge in number of ‘extremely productive’ authors concerns scientists

Up to four times more researchers pump out more than 60 papers a year than less than a decade ago. Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw the sharpest uptick in the number of such scientists over the past few years, according to a preprint posted on bioRxiv on 24 November. The increase in these ‘extremely productive’ authors raises concerns that some researchers are resorting to dubious methods to publish extra papers.

“I suspect that questionable research practices and fraud may underlie some of the most extreme behaviours,” says study co-author John Ioannidis, a physician specializing in metascience at Stanford University in California. “Our data provide a starting point for discussing these issues across all science.”

Ioannidis and his colleagues examined articles, reviews and conference papers indexed in the Scopus database between 2000 and 2022. They excluded physics authors, who tend to publish large numbers of papers because authorship practices in this field differ from those of other subjects. The researchers tracked how extremely productive authorship has changed over time in various countries and fields.

Overall, most extremely productive authors outside physics were in clinical medicine, which had nearly 700 of these supercharged researchers in 2022 (see ‘Hyper-productive fields’). Agriculture, fisheries and forestry saw the speediest growth in extremely productive researchers, increasing by 14.6 times between 2016 and 2022, followed by biology, and mathematics and statistics.