{"id":245,"date":"2026-03-25T13:35:37","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/?p=245"},"modified":"2026-03-25T13:39:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:39:27","slug":"prolific-authors-and-why-theyre-a-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/2026\/03\/25\/prolific-authors-and-why-theyre-a-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Prolific authors and why they\u2019re a problem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cIt is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.\u201d Tom Lehrer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you look back at the papers you\u2019ve published over the past year and you think you had a good year, think again. According to DBLP, 5 authors published more than one paper every day of last year<\/strong> (that\u2019s more than 365 papers), and 361 authors published over 100 papers a year. I know many scientists who read fewer than 100 papers per year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The figure below shows the distribution of the number of papers per author for all of DBLP, while the second figure shows the number of papers in AI venues, broadly defined (ICML, NeurIPS, KDD, WWW, etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 1: A histogram of the number of papers per author in DBLP. Note the axes are logarithmic.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Figure 2: A histogram of the number of papers per author in AI venues (broadly defined) according to DBLP. Note the axes are logarithmic.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Who are these prolific authors? Among the top 50, there are 20 from China and another 6 from Hong Kong, 13 from the USA, 7 Singaporeans, two Australians and 2 from the EU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we define prolific authors as those who have published over 500 papers during their career, we can plot the percentage of their papers over the years, compared to the same for all other (less \u201cproductive\u201d) authors. As the figure below shows, for most of the time since 1970 the two groups have looked similar. Then, since around 2020, they\u2019ve began to diverge, and the prolific authors begin to publish much more than the rest of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 3: Publications over the years, normalized separately for prolific authors and for all other authors<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Another hint about these authors comes from looking at those who publish most each year, and their tenure at the time. Tenure, in this context, is the number of years since they\u2019ve started publishing. If the population of scientists was constant, we\u2019d expect this tenure to be the same, but my data is finite and there are more and more scientists, so the slope of the tenure is lower. The figure below shows the data for the 100 most prolific authors each year. Over most years the slope of the tenure is around 0.3 (as you can see from the dotted line, which was fit to data up to 2015). Then, around 2018 it diverges, and the tenure rapidly increases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 4: Average tenure of prolific authors over the years<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My understanding, therefore, is that in the past 8 years or so, senior people have began adding their names to publications in ways that they wouldn\u2019t have before then. This is especially true in countries that reward publications (either with academic accolades or financial rewards).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this brings me to an interesting fact. According to the widely-adopted recommendations <\/a>of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), \u201cauthorship be based on the following 4 criteria:<\/p>\n\n\n\n