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I was just thinking about the upper bound on how many papers one could publish in a year earlier this morning. Speaking as someone who spent years in Tech and is now in the middle of a Ph.D. program... Within the current paradigm, where a post-doc gets hired as a new professor and goes about starting the rough equivalent of a single private sector team, at least in my subfield, 15-25 (non-first author publications) a year is an impressive number. And thus the numbers cited in the supplemental materials, the max being 136 papers a year, is strange, and I am pretty sure the author's points about paper mills etc. hold true. This is the great thing about the "Contributor Roles Taxonomy" system: it provides a lower level of abstraction and gives credit for who did what (idea generation, coding, writing, reviewing, raising the money, etc.) compared with using "a publication" at the unit of measure. It really solves a lot of problems. [1] [1] https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Au... But I'd also like to raise another point. People who wind up in Academia tend to go straight from undergrad to grad school (or spend a year being a lab manager in academia) and so most if not all of the systems we use in software development aren't present. Code review, project timeline estimation, building up a lab-wide codebase of functions to speed up repetitive tasks, 360 degree reviews, lab-wide project management software, an org-chart deeper than two (or in rare cases, three) layers, teams with differentiated responsibilities multiple teams, etc. are not the norm. Every so often I hear of one lab here or there that does one or two of these, not all of them. (Though my experience is limited.) My point is that if one were to apply all of the modern systems used for coordinating groups of people to produce structured forms of writing, etc., then 100 papers a year sans a breadth-vs.-depth tradeoff might just be doable. But note that this is not "100 papers as year" from an individual, it's "100 papers a year from a mid-sized institution." (Six teams of four getting out 1.5 papers a month equates to 108 papers a year, near the maximum cited above.) Bell Labs' publication / patent rate must have been high! Granted, what I'm saying is not exactly within the current paradigm of how science is done, and might not be possible in a university setting. |