[kleiba]

studies show it's basically random

The "basically" is important though, because there are some nuances to it.

However, the point I've actually come here to make is that since publications are a strong factor for your career progress in academia, a corollary of the above is that making it in academia is basically random, too. Which is also true for other reasons, though: for every open professor position in a certain field, there are usually a number of candidates that are all equally highly qualified. But only one of them can get the gig. If the selection is not random, then it's typically based on other factors, such as, how well you are connected, your gender, whether some other professor at the faculty fears competition from you, etc. -- which may not be random, but is equally out of your control in all but a few cases.

[blagie]

My experience is that for elite schools -- Stanford and MIT -- the remaining factor is how much one is willing to cheat. There is a random component, a merit-based component, but most (and I have large n here) successful affiliated faculty candidates did so by cheating in some way.

That can be data baking, credit theft, or a whole slew of other techniques, but at least in my department, most new faculty at least at these two schools are in some way crooked.

Also, for nuance on random:

http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html

[kleiba]

And one more: https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac...

[blagie]

From the article:

"99.99% of us are honest but the dishonest 0.01% can cause serious, repeated damage."

My experience is that this is much more like a 50/50 split at elite schools, at least when you look at people who succeed at making it to faculty positions. BMJ estimates 20% of publications are based on fabricated data:

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...

That sounds about right for what I've seen at MIT. Note that 20% of publications being based on fabricated data is in-line with my 50/50 split figure. Researchers who cheat only do it part of the time, and often in ways which don't involve direct data fabrication. Critically, the numbers go up significantly for high-impact publications -- they types that make the news and make scientific careers. By the time MIT's PR machine picks up a publication, and the press picks up from there, the odds of it being fraudulent are much higher than 50/50.