[aborsy]

A new breed of academics has appeared whose jobs is to put their names in every paper possible. Literally, their job is to work on frameworks to buy co-authorship.

They do this in various ways, like establishing paper pipelines, collecting rents on labs and committees, focusing on money layer, using their profiles and citation count to help with acceptance of papers of other people , etc. You talk to them and they can’t explain their papers beyond a superficial introduction.

They collect huge citations, travel and give talk on the winner horses, collect credit, which feeds back into this fraudulent scheme. A scientist used to be a scientist not long ago, not a credit collector.

I wonder if Google could invent a new metric to expose them (weak ratio of first authorship, etc).

[washadjeffmad]

It's not new, and entire disciplines exist because of these dependent structures. It doesn't do to unseat and discredit the connected and well regarded, but you might enjoy some mild comfort in security in numbers through a little citational flattery.

It's a game of cultural tribalism. The only thing worse for one than not engaging is to upset the status quo unblessed.

[matthewdgreen]

A lot of this is downstream of compensation schemes that explicitly reward dumb metrics, like raw paper-count without subjective evaluation of contribution or quality. I don't want to generalize, but this seems to be more common in countries that are not the US or Europe.