Evolving patterns of extreme publishing behavior across science

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.