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Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days

To highlight uncertain norms in authorship, John P. A. Ioannidis, Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack identified the most prolific scientists of recent years.
  1. John P. A. Ioannidis

    1. John P. A. Ioannidis is a professor of medicine at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, California.

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  2. Richard Klavans

    1. Richard Klavans is a researcher at SciTech Strategies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico.

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  3. Kevin W. Boyack

    1. Kevin W. Boyack is a researcher at SciTech Strategies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico.

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Illustration by David Parkins

Authorship is the coin of scholarship — and some researchers are minting a lot. We searched Scopus for authors who had published more than 72 papers (the equivalent of one paper every 5 days) in any one calendar year between 2000 and 2016, a figure that many would consider implausibly prolific1. We found more than 9,000 individuals, and made every effort to count only ‘full papers’ — articles, conference papers, substantive comments and reviews — not editorials, letters to the editor and the like. We hoped that this could be a useful exercise in understanding what scientific authorship means.

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Nature 561, 167-169 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06185-8

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