[thisrod]

Authorship is the metric that scientists get paid for, so of course it has been thoroughly corrupted.

Fake papers and plagiarism are the most blatant form of corruption. They tend to come from certain, let's say, large countries with less developed scientific cultures. Those countries need to put an end to it, because the rest of us keep having to work harder to suppress the racist impressions that we're bound to form of colleagues who look and sound like the cheats.

In more traditional scientific countries, the corruption is more subtle. Today, many groups publish every paper with half a dozen authors, and no indication of what each of them contributed. This enables the professors who run those groups to manipulate authorship more or less as they please, and have total control over who gets to have a career in science. It turns out that absolute power corrupts senior scientists as absolutely as it does other people.

No doubt there are more clever ways to game the system, that I haven't noticed. As long as million dollar grants and first-world citizenship keep being doled out for something as contrived as scientific paper authorship, corruption is inevitable.