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Evolving patterns of extreme publishing behavior across science

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Abstract

Extreme publishing behavior may reflect a combination of some authors with genuinely high publication output and of other people who have their names listed too frequently in publications because of consortium agreements, gift authorship or other spurious practices. We aimed to evaluate the evolution of extreme publishing behavior across countries and scientific fields during 2000–2022. Extreme publishing behavior was defined as having > 60 full articles (original articles, reviews, conference papers) in a single calendar year and indexed in Scopus. We identified 3191 authors with extreme publishing behavior across science excluding Physics and 12624 such authors in Physics. While Physics had much higher numbers of extreme publishing authors in the past, in 2022 extreme publishing authors was almost as numerous in non-Physics and Physics disciplines (1226 vs. 1480). Excluding Physics, China had the largest number of extreme publishing authors, followed by the USA. The largest fold-wise increases between 2016 and 2022 (5-19-fold) occurred in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Spain, India, Italy, Russia, Pakistan, and South Korea. Excluding Physics, most extreme publishing authors were in Clinical Medicine, but from 2016 to 2022 the largest relative increases (> sixfold) were seen in Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, Biology, and Mathematics and Statistics. Extreme publishing authors accounted for 4360 of the 10000 most-cited authors (based on raw citation count) across science. While most Physics authors with extreme publishing behavior had modest citation impact in a composite citation indicator that adjusts for co-authorship and author positions, 67% of authors with extreme publishing behavior in non-Physics fields remained within the top-2% according to that indicator among all authors with >  = 5 full articles. Extreme publishing behavior has become worryingly common across scientific fields with rapidly increasing rates in some countries and settings and may herald a rapid depreciation of authorship standards.

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Data availability

All key data are in the manuscript and its supplementary files. More detailed data on the 3,191 extreme publishing authors in non-Physics scientific fields and on the 12,624 extreme publishing authors in Physics are available in https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/kmyvjk3xmd/2.

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Acknowledgements

A pre-print of this work has been deposited to bioRxiv, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.23.568476

Funding

The work of JPAI is supported by an unrestricted gift from Sue and Bob O’ Donnell to Stanford University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

  2. Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

  3. Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

  4. Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

  5. Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    John P. A. Ioannidis

  6. Elsevier, 230 Park Avenue, New York, New York, USA

    Thomas A. Collins

  7. Elsevier B.V, Research Intelligence, 1043 NX, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jeroen Baas

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Contributions

JPAI had the original idea and wrote the first draft of the article. TAC analyzed the data with contributions also from JPAI and JB. All authors discussed iterations of the protocol, interpreted the data and contributed writing the article and approved the final version. JPAI is guarantor.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John P. A. Ioannidis.

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Conflicts of interest

METRICS has been funded by grants from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (Arnold Ventures). TAC and JB are Elsevier employees and Elsevier runs Scopus which is the source of the data. None of the authors is extreme publishing according to the definitions used in this article.

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Ioannidis, J.P.A., Collins, T.A. & Baas, J. Evolving patterns of extreme publishing behavior across science. Scientometrics 129, 5783–5796 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05117-w

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