Publishing a research paper every 37 hours

[Formerly AvP]

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech ... years.html

Slacker couldn't be bothered to make it one every day, but perhaps he'll manage that in his new University affiliations.
Obviously only jealousy could lead to any suspicions about the quality of the work.

[Chris Preston]

I read Luque's comments with a fair bit of disbelief. How could someone think this sort of behaviour was OK without being a complete narcissist? He reminds me of Donald Trump.

There is a lot of shadyness in science at the moment, which is deeply disappointing to someone who has given 40 years to scientific research (my average is 5 papers a year). It is good U Cordoba has acted.

[Sciolus]

There's a lot of WTFery in that article, for sure. But Luque is a symptom, not the disease.

[jimbob]

There's a lot of WTFery in that article, for sure. But Luque is a symptom, not the disease.

See also Didier Raoult

[Formerly AvP]

There's a lot of WTFery in that article, for sure. But Luque is a symptom, not the disease.

I'm not sure I understand: what's the disease, and how is he a symptom?

[jimbob]

There's a lot of WTFery in that article, for sure. But Luque is a symptom, not the disease.

I'm not sure I understand: what's the disease, and how is he a symptom?

I guess that, like Raoult, he just got his name appended as an author of every paper his subordinates published despite the obvious impossibility of having had a substantive* input into so many papers.



*Or indeed any in most, I'd guess. I'm trying to find the story so saw where such a prolific author defended himself for not correcting a clear error in a subsequently-retracted paper by saying that he'd not checked the data.

[dyqik]

There's a lot of WTFery in that article, for sure. But Luque is a symptom, not the disease.

I'm not sure I understand: what's the disease, and how is he a symptom?

Promotion by H-index and citation count.

[shpalman]

There's a lot of WTFery in that article, for sure. But Luque is a symptom, not the disease.

I'm not sure I understand: what's the disease, and how is he a symptom?

I guess that, like Raoult, he just got his name appended as an author of every paper his subordinates published despite the obvious impossibility of having had a substantive* input into so many papers.



*Or indeed any in most, I'd guess. I'm trying to find the story so saw where such a prolific author defended himself for not correcting a clear error in a subsequently-retracted paper by saying that he'd not checked the data.

There's the Majorana ones where the theorist throws the experimentalists under the bus on twitter while claiming he'd never really believed that the papers actually demonstrated Majoranas.

[Woodchopper]

There's a lot of WTFery in that article, for sure. But Luque is a symptom, not the disease.

I'm not sure I understand: what's the disease, and how is he a symptom?

Promotion by H-index and citation count.

Yes, and not just promotion and citations.

Places also offer money and other incentives for the authors of academic publications, and funding for departments and institutes can be can partly based on overall publication counts.

When there are so many incentives its not surprising that there are some dodgy practices.

[Sciolus]

Just so. The original article has several examples of individual institutions and The System incentivising Luque's behaviour. From the article, he seems to be considered highly successful, and both he and the institutions he is associated seem to be well-rewarded for it.

Interestingly, he seems to have entered a positive feedback loop: Get your name on huge number of papers; become a superstar; people invite you to add your name to their papers for some reflected glory; get your name on even more papers.

As an aside, surely publishing poor-quality papers is an actively bad thing: at best it wastes other people's expensive time and drowns out the good work, at worst misleads them. (I'm not saying Luque's papers were poor-quality, I don't know them.) Is there any disincentive in the system for doing it?

(Disclosure: I'm not an academic and most of what I know of academia is thrid-hand. I do have my name on one paper; it's sh.t and I'm thoroughly embarrassed about it.)

[Brightonian]

"Agriculture, fisheries and forestry saw the speediest growth", and physics is excluded.

[Holylol]

"Agriculture, fisheries and forestry saw the speediest growth", and physics is excluded.

Just the idea of having to interact with a paper submission system once a week gives me nightmares.

[dyqik]

"Agriculture, fisheries and forestry saw the speediest growth", and physics is excluded.

Just the idea of having to interact with a paper submission system once a week gives me nightmares.

FTFM

[bob sterman]

Wow - beats the well known (http://steamtraen.blogspot.com/2019/08/ ... icate.html) but laggardly Mark Griffiths who only managed a paper every 49 hours in 2022.

https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/so ... -griffiths