[DevX101]

It's kind of like, when reporters say a CEO built [insert ridiculously complex product here], ex: ascribing the success of OpenAI to Sam Altman, or Apple to Steve Jobs. Sure there were important in setting the direction, and allocating resources but they didn't actually do the work.

Similarly, the heads of famous science labs have lots of talented scientists who want to work with them. The involvement of a lab director varies wildly, but for the hyper productive, famous ones, it's largely the director curating great people, providing scientific advice, and setting a general research direction. The lab director gets named on all these papers that get generated from this process.

So 800 papers isn't necessarily a red flag if the director is great at fundraising and has lots of graduate students/post docs doing the heavy lifting.

[benrapscallion]

800 papers is still a red flag, even if throughout those years he had 30 postdocs at any given time (which is only true for large labs).

[pcrh]

800 is a lot, even for someone with a big lab.

More than likely many of those authorships were "honorary", that is Masliah "lent" his (once-famous) name to help others publish their own work. He likely provided little actual contribution to many of these papers.

As such one would normally only give an author "full" credit (and responsibility) if they appear as either first or last in the list of authors. In the biosciences these are the positions indicating substantial contributions to the published work.

His co-authors are now going to be very annoyed as association with this "honorary" author will now cast doubt upon their own work.

[directevolve]

Over 20 years, that’s 40 per year on average. He’s emeritus from UCSD and I don’t see his old lab page online, not sure how big it was. But my PI’s lab had 13 last year and has 11 people. If Masliah had around 33 people that would be a pretty normal papers per capita.

[pcrh]

Most neuroscience papers of the type Masliah published are the result of at least 2 person-years of hands-on work (and up to 10 or 15 person-years for large papers).

800 papers over 25 years would therefore need a minimum staff of 64 full time researchers for the entirety of those 25 years. Masliah didn't have this.

For most papers on which Masliah is an author, the majority of the work will have been performed in other labs, with Masliah and those under him contributing to a greater or lesser extent. Such collaborative work is not a bad thing (assuming everyone is honest).

Web.archive has a shot of his now-deleted lab page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240303093209/https://www.nia.n...