[Daub]

For a few years I worked closely with computer engineers in a S E Asian university. I got to know quite well the sort of stuff they published. Some of the dodgy stuff i saw:

Recycling. Some papers seemed to be near duplicates of prior work by the same academic, with minor modification.

Faddishnes. Papers featuring the latest buzz technologies regardless of whether they were appropriate.

Questionable authorship. Some senior academics would get their name included on publications regardless of whether they had been actively engaged with that project. I saw a few academics get involved in risky and potentially interesting subjects, but they all risked their careers in doing so.

But most of all, there was a dearth of true innovation. The university noticed this and established an Innovation Centre. It quickly became full of second hand projects all frustratingly similar to projects in the US from a few years ago.

Of course there were exceptions, and learning from them was a genuine growth experience fir which I am grateful.

[bonoboTP]

It's not just about the academics but the expectations from higher ups and funding agencies in order to keep your job and have a chance at continuing your career. Over the last few decades the expected amount of papers at good and even mediocre institutions has exploded. Profs who want to be seen as productive and who want good funding publish 30-50 papers per year and sometimes "supervise" dozens of PhD students at the same time (who agree to the deal to get the brand name of the big prof, not for any real supervision).

Funding agencies can't evaluate the research itself, so they look at numbers, metrics, impact factors, citations, h-index, publication count etc. They can't simply say "we pay this academic whether he publishes or not because we trust he is still deep in important work when he is not at a work stage to publish" because people will suspect fraud and nepotism and bias, and often the funding is taxpayer money. Not that the metrics prevent that of course. But it seems that way. So metrics it is, so gaming the metrics via Goodhart's law it is.

I don't think it's super bad, but it increases administrative work and busywork overhead on top of the actual research. The progress slows somewhat per person, as the same work has to be salami sliced and marketed in chunks, but there's also way more people in it, but of course most of them produce vary low quality stuff but it's not a big loss because these people would not even have published anything some decades ago, they would just have some teaching professorship and publish every few years perhaps just in their national language. It increases the noise but there are ways to find the signal among it, and academics figure out ways to cut through the noise. It's not great, not super easy, and it pushes a lot of people out who dislike the grind but there are plenty who see it as a relatively good deal to move to a richer country and do this.

[tokinonagare]

I've seen faddishnes and questionable authorship in a top-3 Japan university too. The lab I was in was a paper mill, the professor even explicitly told student than quantity > quality. I'm glad in France things are getting a bit slower but deeper (from my observations).