[janoc]

It is next to impossible to detect despite being so crude.

Unless there is an explicit suspicion, nobody is going to systematically check all your citations and papers. There are simply too many of these things to do that systematically, for every researcher, grad student or professor.

The universities don't have resources for something like that - that would mean hiring multiple people doing just work like that full time. And it still wouldn't uncover the slightly more sophisticated cases, such as the professor getting a "mandatory citation" on every paper produced by the students working in their lab.

How do you think can a professor publish 20-30 journal papers a year (that's both a very common number and still quite low) when getting a single paper written and shepherded through the review process takes months in the best case and could take even 2 years in the worst for the large journals?

Yes, all the work is done by the grad students and assistant profs - and the professor's name gets added to the list of authors as a sign of respect (in the best case) or because they were told to do that (in the worst one). This is an extremely common practice.

I have personally witnessed one guy build essentially an entire fake academic career like this, by pushing grad students to credit him for work he didn't do - and he almost got away with it. He didn't obtain a tenured position at a prestigious European university only because one of the professors in the tenure committee worked with him before and knew how did he obtain those (on paper) stellar research credentials - and vetoed it.

Moreover, most of the metrics like impact factor are just a number. You can't see what they have been calculated from. Research has always been built on individual integrity and honesty. And there will always be bad apples that abuse it.

The motivations and what is on stake (your career, job, grants, etc.) are so skewed that a lot of people feel pushed into cheating like this.

[leereeves]

> all the work is done by the grad students and assistant profs - and the professor's name gets added to the list of authors as a sign of respect (in the best case) or because they were told to do that (in the worst one). This is an extremely common practice.

Just recently, Yann LeCun bragged on Twitter about publishing over 80 papers in two years.

I wondered who he thought he was impressing. Anyone who knows anything about science knows that at least the majority of those weren't his own work.

(No disrespect intended; YLC has done important work. But that tweet was not his best idea.)

[almostgotcaught]

Do you know what he does all day at FB? Posts links to arxiv on workplace (which is the internal/business variant of FB). Like I'm saying you can see everything he does and he had exactly zero diffs while I was there.

[renonce]

I mean I respect him for his contributions but what about being more specific with the contributions, like “I brought the idea” or “I supervised the research” or even “I managed the lab and arranged for the equipments with which my students conducted research”, any would be perfectly valid contributions to science. But it seems like the academic norm is just to boast “I was an author of these shiny new papers” and the details of how are obscured away almost intentionally.

[belter]

That is a paper every 9 days...