First-authored full research papers, I’d be suspicious of more than 5 de novo submissions a year in my field. It’s possible if they’re exceptionally productive and a little lucky, but consistently more than that would tell me a) they’re probably completely salami-sliced junk, or b) stealing credit from lab staff/students/postdocs
1 year ago | 86
How many grad students do they have to do the work for them?
1 year ago | 102
It depends on the field, the type of institution, size of research group, collaboration network etc. I work in “materials science” (for want of a better term) and am 20 years out of my PhD. I’ve contributed to on average about 3 papers per year (roughly). But I’m not very productive and for the last 10 years research has only been about 30% of my job.
1 year ago (edited) | 1
Depends on the journal. 3 Nature or Science publications would be a lot more suspicious than 20 articles in the North Dakota journal of Fungi and Plasmodium.
1 year ago | 17
If it is Salami science then 5-10. If it is novel then 1 every two years. If you are physician then 1 every 3 years. If you are a sociologist or psychologist then many. If it is data mining then 2-3 per year. If you are alone 1 per 3 years. If you are in a lab or institution as a director then 5 per year. University faculty promotion is predicated on research publications and not on teaching students. Grants and sustainability is determined by number of publications. Hence Salami science is prevalent. This results in white noise of information.
1 year ago | 1
Having had the privilege of working with several people who consistently publish, and meaningfully contribute to, about 10 studies per year, I’m convinced this is the limit. All these people are some combo of extremely intelligent, singularly dedicated, well-organized, densely networked, and just pleasure to be around. Without fail, science is their life.
1 year ago | 8
Some scientists have groups of 50 people, so they can legitimately author 50 papers per year.
1 year ago | 1
Even 10 is sus. 10 published, presumably peer reviewed scientific papers in a year?
1 year ago | 9
That depends a lot on logistics. You could easily have years worth of work setting up a large lab or equipment and get a lot of data relatively fast. I could easily see a modeling and experimental paper for each major variable tested. Then one or two to tie it all together.
1 year ago | 3
If their name is at the end, meaning that the Phd students are publishing the paper and doing the work, then it depends on how productive the PhD students are, which is usually maybe 1 paper per year per PhD student (2 papers if they're really really really outstanding). If their name is 1st author, I would say maybe like 1-2 papers at most. (In my field of engineering)
1 year ago | 1
Depends on several things including field but honestly 6-10 and I get kind of sus, this is for when they are the first author I feel like it’s different for non-first authors
1 year ago | 2
There’s not enough information to determine. A mathematician hosting an REU with 10 students could easily publish 4 papers in a month, for example.
1 year ago | 2
Depends? In theoretical fields (pure math, economics, theoretical physics), the sky's the limit. But if it's an experimental field, 10+ would be sus.
1 year ago | 2
It also depends on the research field. For big research topics like high-energy physics, 30~ish papers are normal, but by no means the papers are written by a single author.
1 year ago | 0
Whats really sus is how lenient peer review has become. What used to be a highly regarded standard of accountability has fallen to the wayside
1 year ago | 1
1 is enough. But the issue is with the "peer review" that is nothing more than proof-reading, thus worthless.
1 year ago | 0
Very field dependent. In mine it's almost always single-authored papers, so maybe 4 or 5, but there's always the possibility of having more in a year because of the duration of the evaluation and peer-review process, as well as the editorial timetable. I'll have quite a few papers dated 2023 because of this, some were under review for like a year, and some were submitted in 2024 but will come out in the 2023 issue of the journal...
1 year ago | 0
Pete Judo
How many publications can a scientist have in a year before it seems suspicious?
1 year ago | [YT] | 63