Do we really need to worry about hyper-prolific authors?

When Clarivate excluded 432 authors last November from its latest Highly Cited Researchers list in response to concerns over “extreme levels of publication relative to field baselines”, the move was hailed in some quarters as a rare, tangible effort to push back on a rising tide of authorship behaviour that strains credulity about how much it is possible to achieve without compromising rigour and ethics.

“Traditional norms of authorship and credit can be strained and even challenged as scholarly research itself transforms, especially from the rise of team science addressing ever more complex questions,” David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, told Times Higher Education.

“The imperative to publish in quantity can have unintended negative consequences, leading to unwarranted authorship credit,” he added. “When an author produces several papers a week over many years, it is only reasonable to wonder about the extent of involvement and responsibility for any of the papers.”

That wondering has been going on out loud at least since a 2018 Nature article drew attention to more than 9,000 “hyper-prolific authors” who had published 72 full academic papers – the equivalent of one every five days – in any one calendar year between 2000 and 2016. The paper’s authors – John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University, and Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack, researchers at SciTech Strategies – made clear that they had “no evidence that these authors are doing anything inappropriate” and saw their study as “a useful exercise in understanding what scientific authorship means”, noting the range of criteria offered in different countries and fields.

For instance, 86 per cent of the hyper-prolific authors worked in physics, which is known for publishing papers with 1000-plus authors in fields such as high-energy and particle physics where large international collaborations are the norm.

“Authorship in these cases does not mean that all these people wrote the paper or would qualify for traditional Vancouver criteria [outlining bona fide authorship],” Ioannidis told THE. It simply reflects the fact that “they were part of a very large team and everyone in that field recognises this as the expected norm of giving credit”. When these were excluded, alongside various other anomalies, only 265 authors remained – but this amounted to a 20-fold increase between 2001 and 2014 – over which same period, the total number of authors increased only 2.5-fold.

After 2014, Ioannidis and his co-authors found that the number of hyper-prolific authors – about half of whom were in medical and life sciences – levelled off. But the trend line seems more recently to have started to rise sharply again. According to a 2025 preprint in Quantitative Social Sciences by researchers at the American University of Beirut, for instance, some 9,011 authors met Ioannidis’ hyper-prolific publishing threshold in at least one year between 2019 and 2024 even when physicists were excluded. Moreover, when a “more conservative threshold” of 40 papers a year was applied, hyper-prolific authors increased in number by 66 per cent, from 2,517 in 2019 to 4,189 in 2023, against a wider increase in publications of 15 per cent over that period.

There is also a “growing trend of multiple institutional affiliations”, often across different countries, with “some authors listing affiliations with more than 20 institutions”, the paper says, noting the agglomeration of these hyper-prolific authors in universities in India and the Middle East. That trend was linked to a more than doubling in publication volumes from 80 universities between 2019 and 2023, even while the number of first-authorship publications fell at these institutions. This could be linked to concerns that some universities are attempting to game rankings by offering paid affiliations to large numbers of researchers primarily based elsewhere.

The 81 hyper-prolific authors who responded to Ioannidis and his co-authors’ questions about how it was possible for them to be so productive gave a range of answers. “Common themes were: hard work; love of research; mentorship of very many young researchers; leadership of a research team, or even of many teams; extensive collaboration; working on multiple research areas or in core services; availability of suitable extensive resources and data; culmination of a large project; personal values such as generosity and sharing; experiences growing up; and sleeping only a few hours per day,” the paper reported.

Ioannidis added that some frequently publishing authors “have created or participated in micro-environments where there is an inflation of authorship, so that more people appear in the author mastheads of papers than what would be the case for other teams who work in the same discipline”. One example is epidemiological cohort studies, in connection with which “some teams may put three authors, others may put 10 authors, and still others may put 500 authors for a paper that is basically requiring the same amount of work. While not overtly unethical, this variance in calibration [makes it problematic] to compare CVs without adjusting for the micro-environment a scientist has worked in,” Ioannidis reflected.

A further group of hyper-prolific authors are likely to be undertaking “outright unethical practices”, Ioannidis said, such as “receiving gift authorship because of seniority or other power and perhaps in some cases participating in even more spurious cartels and even fraudulent work that tries to build impressive CVs.”

Moreover, the rewards that it often unlocks makes such behaviour highly contagious, according to Achal Agrawal, who runs India Research Watch, an online group of researchers and students calling out unethical research practices in Indian universities.

“Hyper-prolific authors are not just tolerated [in India],” he said. “They are celebrated with best researcher awards. They are treated as celebrities and command a high price in the marketplace as all universities in the rankings race want the hyper-prolific authors working for them,” added Agrawal, who quit his university job in 2022 after becoming disillusioned with the rise of unethical research practices at Indian universities.

In many cases, authors will simply “write letters and commentaries, which still get counted as an article” yet these outputs are still enough for hyper-prolific authors to gain affiliations to up to 10 institutions in a single year, he explains.

“All this makes others aspire to become hyper-prolific as well as it is seen as a desirable trait in a researcher, at least [among] the universities who are in the race for rankings,” Agrawal said. “Of course, the honest researchers get sidelined in such an ecosystem and don't find jobs and funding. They are also given extra teaching load because they are not publishing enough. Some universities don't let professors have Saturdays off if they don't publish enough.”

A similar problem exists in China, according to Bruce Macfarlane, dean of the faculty of education and human development at the Education University of Hong Kong. “Very few East Asian institutions are part of the San Francisco agreement (Dora) or the Leiden Manifesto, [which] take a stance against the excessive use of metrics to evaluate people,” he said.

“This means that the pursuit of publication and ranking in Hong Kong or China makes academics super-focused and in a massive foot race with others to boost up their h-index, citation count and so on without any moral compass.”

In 2016, for instance, Ioannidis and his co-authors found that “at least 12, and possibly more than 20, authors based in China were hyper-prolific, the largest number from any country that year. We believe that this could be connected to Chinese policies that reward publication with cash or to possible corruption”. The paper also revealed that “there were disproportionally more hyper-prolific authors in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, countries both known to incentivize publication with cash rewards”.

The “majority” of hyper-prolific authors excluded from Clarivate’s highly cited list had an affiliation in mainland China, the organisation said.

As well as putting undue strain on the creaking peer review system, which is finding qualified reviewers increasingly difficult to find, critics of hyper-prolific authors also blame them for trading quality for quantity in publication. But in a Journal of Informetrics paper published in May 2025, the Italian researchers Giovanni Abramo and Ciriaco Andrea D'Angelo analysed highly productive authors across several disciplines and pushed back against the assumption that there is an automatic trade-off between quality and quantity.

“On average, hyper-prolific authors in our sample publish higher-impact papers than comparable peers,” Abramo told THE. “This aligns with some recent evidence, while contrasting with earlier worries that very high productivity necessarily dilutes quality,” he continued, stating that a “plausible interpretation is that higher impact reflects structural advantages: large collaboration networks, access to substantial resources (funding, staff, infrastructure), and positioning in high-visibility fields or projects.”

But this high average impact of prolific authors’ papers “doesn’t rule out problematic practices”, Abramo conceded. “A major risk is honorary (or gift) authorship, in which individuals receive credit without a commensurate intellectual contribution, artificially inflating publication records,” he said. “But hyper-prolificacy can also reflect legitimate division of labour in large teams, especially in lab-heavy or clinical environments.

Nor is Abramo alone in viewing hyper-prolificacy as an understandable outcome of developments in scientific practice. According to a recent literature review in Scientometrics by researchers in Brazil and Italy, only a minority of studies into hyper-prolific authors could be described as “accusatory” with most papers taking a “neutral” or even “optimistic” view about the intentions of those publishing at high rates.

Alessandro De Cassai, from the Department of Medicine at University of Padua, said he was “quite surprised” to see his study on hyper-prolific authors in intensive care medicine listed as “optimistic” about such scientists. After all, the paper notes it is “improbable that a researcher could make substantial contributions …. to a new paper every five or six calendar days.”

However, he admitted to being sceptical that hyper-prolific authors are “truly a major concern in practice”, noting that they represent only a very small fraction of the author population: about 0.1 per cent.”

Moreover, he agreed that “the larger and more international a research network is, the easier it becomes to publish more frequently. Suppose I collaborate with researcher A in the United States and researcher B in Australia, and we regularly exchange ideas and results. If my experiments fail in a given month and I cannot publish my findings, but A and B obtain strong results, it is entirely possible that we would work together on their manuscript instead. In this sense, the larger the collaborative network, the easier it becomes to contribute to publications.”

He conceded that “this mechanism can also be abused in various ways, [but] our study shows that most of these papers are published in highly reputable journals and receive an adequate number of citations,” he said. “This suggests not only that the manuscripts are well written but also that they have a genuine impact on the discipline.”

For his part, Ioannidis conceded that “some amazing scientists may be amazingly productive, and I find nothing wrong with productivity per se. I think it is important, however, not to reward number of papers per se as a metric of excellence.” That practice is widely blamed for the phenomenon of researchers “salami-slicing” single research projects into numerous separate papers when they could have been combined onto one much better one.

“An excellent scientist may have to publish one paper or 5,000 papers to document properly, transparently and fully their work,” Ioannidis said. “I would focus more on the impact of this single paper” compared with the cumulative impact of the 5,000, he said. He suggested that metrics in certain fields could be adjusted for co-authorship norms to ensure “hyper-prolific behaviour does not get an indirect bonus”.

Abramo suggested that publishers alerted to hyper-prolific patterns “should ask authors to explain how their publication volume maps onto genuine contributions, roles and team structure”. Yet it is institutions that should carry explicit responsibility for curbing game-playing, he believes. “If universities or research organisations fail to intervene, they may be perceived as complicit or as actively incentivising questionable practices through internal targets and reward schemes,” he said.

“A relatively straightforward policy lever is to change evaluation rules”, he added, suggesting that hiring, promotion and funding assessments should adopt “fractional counting” or “contribution-weighted credit”, whereby the amount of authorship kudos that applicants receive from a paper declines as the number of co-authors increases.

But it would be wrong, he said, to pin too many of the problems of academic publishing on a small proportion of authors who are, by and large, “highly capable researchers who can attract talented people to work with and for.”

On the other hand, he conceded that publishers will need to adapt to AI, which will “raise research productivity – not only for hyper-prolific authors, but for the entire system”.

“With the same resources, we can expect more output and potentially higher quality than before because many tasks (writing support, coding assistance, translation, literature triage) become cheaper and faster,” he said. Hence, “journals and editors will need more efficient and effective screening as submission volumes grow”.

And in such an environment, reining in some of the output ambitions of hyper-prolific authors may not be a bad thing to protect them from themselves, he added.

“Some are not satisfied with being excellent; they push beyond the limits of what is professionally and ethically acceptable,” he said. “That can cast doubt even on the work they truly did well.”