[vnorilo]

I am not sure a Yelp-like system would work for the reasons others have mentioned.

I would suggest these metrics to help you evaluate a doc program from the outside:

Do early-stage grad students get (any) authorship credits together with professors or post docs? (Getting started)

Do they eventually get first author status? (Independence)

Do students go to conferences and read papers? Or does a prof just go and read all 10 from her institution? (Networking)

Do fresh doctors land post docs, tenure, or good private sector jobs? (Outcome)

A lot of this can be deduced by google (scholar) and scanning conference proceedings and video recordings.

(defended my doc in 2016 in Finland, been fairly succesful at post doc funding as well as private sector)

[kayaeb]

protip: if your prof is tenured and still first author on more than 2 papers a year, they're siphoning their student's work, or they're setting you up for pipelining positions (which are not horrible, but, be aware that's what's up).

I've never had a prof insert my work into their own papers, they've hooked me up to contribute to other teams, but with us it was always "my" project.

If you get a chance to see them present at a conference (lots of these are on video online nowadays), check if they specifically mention their students in the presentation, that's a green flag.

[vnorilo]

Good observation.

Writing as second author was a very positive factor very early on. I was an assistant to a research fellow from my second year at uni, mostly because of coding skills. Pretty soon they encouraged me to write a pragraph or two about the implementation details, and I got added to the author list. I felt that was appropriate and a great kickstart to a research career (got my first MIT press journal credit before my bachelor)

I agree however that professors growth-hacking their publication lists with student labor is problematic indeed and looking at first/second author creds is a good way to flag such behavior.