When I was in grad school our department had a meeting every morning where we could get together to discuss the latest papers which we called "Morning Coffee" (or also Astro Coffee). These discussions were pretty fruitful and regularly would inspire new papers.
After writing a new paper based on one of these discussions one of the professors decided to commemorate the contribution of Morning Coffee to the paper and added "M. Coffee" as an author. At some point word got out that M. Coffee was not a real person. From what I understand the journal got very upset. Nevertheless, the original author list still stands:
Who thought it was a good idea to use academic paper authorship as a selection criteria for university!? There can't be enough high school kids writing academic papers for it to be that helpful, and certainly encourages this kind of cheating.
They don't have it as a selection criteria. Some context:
South Korean educational system recently had a crackdown on private academy(hakwon), and in their infinite wisdom, decided to ban every non-public educational experiences (including things like international olympiad awards) when applying for the university. Which means that the only thing you can submit in the application is SAT scores, some public education awards, and personal essays. Naturally it became the fight of who can write the most compelling personal essays for the university, and people started to let their children 'write' academic papers so that they can write stories to claim their interest and impetus on the application in hopes of impressing the judges.
So it is not a selection criteria but it helped rich & powerful people get an edge in the university application.
This is exactly what I find confusing about the whole affair. A university applicant with an academic paper authorship under their belt, while in high school, should warrant extra scrutiny, not automatically jump them to the top of the list.
It wasn't that hard for me to be a co-author on a scientific paper in high school. I just walked into some research hospitals, asked if anyone there wanted some help, and worked with some researchers after school a few times a week. I did the lab work, the charts and graphs, and the first rough draft of the paper. The researchers provided the analysis and conclusions and finalized the paper. And voila! A few months later a paper appeared in a journal with my name on it.
You put on your resume: interned at such-and-such lab, was co-author on paper X based on work done over that summer.
Paying any attention to any extracurriculars could be thought of as "encouraging cheating"- just get someone to sign off that you actually attended Food Club, or that you interned at Widget Co., your cousin's business.
I had a lot of friends in high school who did the Intel Talent Search (since renamed or reorganized) via partnering with a lab in the nearby university. Most of them got some kind of publication and authorship out of it.
None of it was fake, and I don't think this is uncommon for applications to top schools.
AP Capstone introduces two research focused classes with pretty high academic rigor, I think it’s great for college prep. We should do more research not less.
Since I'm reading Patrick O'Brian again, I can't help but be reminded of the practice of false muster - keeping well-connected boys on the books of warships as midshipmen fraudulently, so as to accrue more service time and seniority.
> The practice was probably used to improve the children’s chances of securing a university place.
The fact the competition to get into a university is so hard you need to co-author a scientific paper for this is the problem. Education should be accessible for everybody.
So in one place of the world professors and higher ranking academics are taking credit for the work of those working under them, in another place academics are giving credit to children who did not even contribute, and in certain disciplines (physics for instance, afaik) it is commonplace to just name everyone working in same the place as you as co-authors, whether they contributed to that specific paper or not.
Let's not forget about ludicrous amounts of bullshit-papers being produced to inflate paper counts and citations.
Whoever thinks paper counts and authorship are good metrics for anything at this point? In fact I believe they are more likely to mislead than be useful.
Years ago, I implemented a piecewise-linear approximation algorithm based on this [1] paper. I was amused that the primary author was a high schooler, the secondary working at Infineon, both in Torrance, CA. The math isn't beyond high school level, so I figured it was some AP level exercise between the parent and the child at writing/publishing a paper.
I guess this is just another flavor of claiming one's kid was a top rower for their high school crew team. But I guess many parents will use whatever means then can ( legal or illegal ) to give their children a leg up.
Also, I find it interesting that many schools ( in the US ) will do away with SAT scores because it is unfair to disadvantaged students. But they will not get rid of their legacy admissions program which is the most biased criteria against disadvantaged students. The irony here is that the SAT score was used to counter bias against disadvantaged students in the first place. It was viewed as the only "objective" part of the admissions process which could not be "bought".
My solution to end unfairness in college admissions process is a points based lottery. Each college publicly sets out a points system for GPA, extracurricular activity, SAT, athletics, legacy, etc that they will apply to an applicant and derive a score. Each college publicly sets a "mininum/cutoff" score. Every applicant with a score above the cutoff will enter an independently monitored lottery. The lottery will select the freshman class out of the pool of candidates.
Wow. I just found out about legacy admissions. To me that seems insane. This is not how it is supposed to be! I wouldn't want to apply there now. If I have to work really hard and other people get in by association ...
Similar things occurs for Patent Applications all the time in large corporations, names of managers is usually present along with the names of actual inventors.
Just because someone is a manager doesn't mean that they can't make a meaningful contribution to an invention. In my experience, the patentable ideas can come from anywhere in an organization (and I've seen it from individual contributor level up to VPs)... but the individual contributor is always left figuring out the lower-level details of how to get this idea into production.
If the patent ever ends up in court, they will regret listing non-inventors. Listing non-inventors or failing to list all inventors are both grounds for invalidating the patent.
An interesting spin-off I’ve witnessed here in the United States is putting a younger sibling’s name on papers and research reports submitted to things like the Intel STS and the Siemens Competition. It’s hard to show that there’s evidence of unequal contribution here.
This phenomenon cannot be avoided as long as papers can help kids go to universities.
Maybe we can prevent parents from buying papers for their kids (this can be charged based on evidence more easily). But when the parents themselves are professors, it is just difficult to determine whether the credits are assigned appropriately.
Skills that can be accessed and learnt by the majority should be the criteria for university admission.
I've seen this happen in the US among my peers when I was in high school (mid 2000's). Parents with roles in medical / biomed research were by far the most prevalent offenders.
Usually comes in the form of some faculty's HS-age kid helping out in the lab and getting tacked-on as an author of a paper. Cleaning glassware -> authorship. This sometimes happens to faculty w/o their knowledge, with a grad student or postdoc trying to butter-up their superior.
If I had my way, I'd have each applicant stripped, x-rayed, confined to an acoustically isolated faraday cage, and sit down for an examination generated and marked by an AI system.
I've seen too many enabled people trying to game the system.
That still won't help and might make things worse.
By the time a rich student reaches college selection, he has a number of structural advantages over a poor student.
Let's take the SAT exam in the US, for example. Many poor students take the SAT effectively cold--the idea that you can prepare for that test and that paying money to prep is a good idea are simply not in scope. Whereas, a rich student is simply going to assume that obviously you prep for a test like the SAT and of course you spend money to do so.
That's not far off from what I had to go through the last time I took an education-related standard exam. Nothing but my cloths and ID were allowed into the room and they had a quite through check to make sure of it.
I don't see anything wrong with this if the parents want to share credit with their kids. In any case, there are many cases where authorship is shared with people who didn't contribute, if universities are taking it at face value that's on them. Also, who is to say that the kids weren't onvolved in some way, maybe just as a person to bounce ideas off of.
If the kids made serious contributions, that is one thing. However, that really doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Nepotism is majorly harmful. If their kids go into academia, they already have a huge leg up from having academic parents. Let alone if they already have a strong publishing record which they did not merit. You really harm those who don’t come from that background, which of course, is how class divide can become a chasm.
> In any case, there are many cases wherr authorship is shared with people who didn't contribute
Given the reality of living in a world where references lead to enrichment, this should be considered fraud in every case. The authorship system hinges on trust. Abusing that trust for family gain is wrong.
I'm not sure this is always bad, as long is it's obvious it's not serious or for the purpose of fraud, or if the individual cited actually contributed in some way. Here's a researcher's dog, whose name was Galadriel Mirkwood, cited as a co-author:
Who is to say the dog did not contribute to the author's paper and research in some way she found significant? Likewise with the children. There's tons of papers where people are cited for making the most minor contribution, like just suggesting something that reminded the researcher of something else and that's considered a legitimate practice to acknowledge their inspirational or otherwise supportive input. And yeah kids can make useful suggestions into their parents research and should be allowed to be acknowledged when that is the case.
The dog lady was banned from publication until the angry editor died! Overkill IMO as I see no fraud there. Fortunately when she was up for tenure she got it, with the tenure committee finding regarding the dog issue that the coauthorship was legitimate because "It was a real dog [a frequent lab visitor] and they said it had done no less research than some other coauthors had."
In the Korean case the article notes that after an 2018 audit of 82 papers with child coauthors they were able to determine that about half the children named had participated in the research. So at least that half were legitimately credited. The article then notes that currently 549 papers with child authorship have been reviewed, and only 24 were found to have unjustified authorship. Only 24 of 549 papers with child authors! That's only 4% of papers with child authors being unjustified. What percentage of papers without child authors give unjustified credit? Is it more than 4%? Perhaps! And certainly so for the field of ghostcredited pharmaceutical papers, a known huge problem. It's possible that papers with child authors are even less likely to have unjustified authorship than papers in general.
I do think it’s misleading to acknowledge the sorts of contributions children and dogs might make with co authorship. I do agree that often small contributions are rewarded with authorship, but really I think these are best credited in the acknowledgment section of the paper. Otherwise there is not a good way to distinguish between a substantial contribution and an ethereal one.
[+] [-] antognini|6 years ago|reply
After writing a new paper based on one of these discussions one of the professors decided to commemorate the contribution of Morning Coffee to the paper and added "M. Coffee" as an author. At some point word got out that M. Coffee was not a real person. From what I understand the journal got very upset. Nevertheless, the original author list still stands:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ...556L..59P/abstra...
[+] [-] gimmeThaBeet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyBelow|6 years ago|reply
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/q=author%3A%22Coffee%2C...
[+] [-] nemoniac|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93G...
[+] [-] bonzini|6 years ago|reply
https://www.parolacce.org/2014/10/05/the-true-story-of-stron...
(Regarding one of the updates, the name of the antenna also means "cool antenna" in Italian, it's very informal but not vulgar).
[+] [-] roywiggins|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomic_rabbit|6 years ago|reply
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092145260...
[+] [-] telotortium|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qrian|6 years ago|reply
South Korean educational system recently had a crackdown on private academy(hakwon), and in their infinite wisdom, decided to ban every non-public educational experiences (including things like international olympiad awards) when applying for the university. Which means that the only thing you can submit in the application is SAT scores, some public education awards, and personal essays. Naturally it became the fight of who can write the most compelling personal essays for the university, and people started to let their children 'write' academic papers so that they can write stories to claim their interest and impetus on the application in hopes of impressing the judges.
So it is not a selection criteria but it helped rich & powerful people get an edge in the university application.
[+] [-] nkrisc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roywiggins|6 years ago|reply
Paying any attention to any extracurriculars could be thought of as "encouraging cheating"- just get someone to sign off that you actually attended Food Club, or that you interned at Widget Co., your cousin's business.
[+] [-] bpodgursky|6 years ago|reply
None of it was fake, and I don't think this is uncommon for applications to top schools.
[+] [-] foobar_fighter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j7ake|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
Nepotism and zero-sum games just go hand-in-hand.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|6 years ago|reply
The fact the competition to get into a university is so hard you need to co-author a scientific paper for this is the problem. Education should be accessible for everybody.
[+] [-] choonway|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smabie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod775|6 years ago|reply
Let's not forget about ludicrous amounts of bullshit-papers being produced to inflate paper counts and citations.
Whoever thinks paper counts and authorship are good metrics for anything at this point? In fact I believe they are more likely to mislead than be useful.
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|6 years ago|reply
Now I have doubts :)
[1] http://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2008/WCECS2008_pp1191-...
[+] [-] intrnttrll|6 years ago|reply
Also, I find it interesting that many schools ( in the US ) will do away with SAT scores because it is unfair to disadvantaged students. But they will not get rid of their legacy admissions program which is the most biased criteria against disadvantaged students. The irony here is that the SAT score was used to counter bias against disadvantaged students in the first place. It was viewed as the only "objective" part of the admissions process which could not be "bought".
My solution to end unfairness in college admissions process is a points based lottery. Each college publicly sets out a points system for GPA, extracurricular activity, SAT, athletics, legacy, etc that they will apply to an applicant and derive a score. Each college publicly sets a "mininum/cutoff" score. Every applicant with a score above the cutoff will enter an independently monitored lottery. The lottery will select the freshman class out of the pool of candidates.
[+] [-] fhennig|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suyash|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] my_username_is_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|6 years ago|reply
The lawyers for the other side will pursue this.
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudiv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kong75|6 years ago|reply
Maybe we can prevent parents from buying papers for their kids (this can be charged based on evidence more easily). But when the parents themselves are professors, it is just difficult to determine whether the credits are assigned appropriately.
Skills that can be accessed and learnt by the majority should be the criteria for university admission.
[+] [-] starpilot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sithadmin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spamizbad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerzyt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choonway|6 years ago|reply
I've seen too many enabled people trying to game the system.
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
By the time a rich student reaches college selection, he has a number of structural advantages over a poor student.
Let's take the SAT exam in the US, for example. Many poor students take the SAT effectively cold--the idea that you can prepare for that test and that paying money to prep is a good idea are simply not in scope. Whereas, a rich student is simply going to assume that obviously you prep for a test like the SAT and of course you spend money to do so.
[+] [-] telchar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
But this is a bit stranger.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OnlineGladiator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpach|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dooglius|6 years ago|reply
I don't see anything wrong with this if the parents want to share credit with their kids. In any case, there are many cases where authorship is shared with people who didn't contribute, if universities are taking it at face value that's on them. Also, who is to say that the kids weren't onvolved in some way, maybe just as a person to bounce ideas off of.
[+] [-] notjesse|6 years ago|reply
Nepotism is majorly harmful. If their kids go into academia, they already have a huge leg up from having academic parents. Let alone if they already have a strong publishing record which they did not merit. You really harm those who don’t come from that background, which of course, is how class divide can become a chasm.
[+] [-] ebg13|6 years ago|reply
Given the reality of living in a world where references lead to enrichment, this should be considered fraud in every case. The authorship system hinges on trust. Abusing that trust for family gain is wrong.
[+] [-] droithomme|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Dog_co-author_...
Who is to say the dog did not contribute to the author's paper and research in some way she found significant? Likewise with the children. There's tons of papers where people are cited for making the most minor contribution, like just suggesting something that reminded the researcher of something else and that's considered a legitimate practice to acknowledge their inspirational or otherwise supportive input. And yeah kids can make useful suggestions into their parents research and should be allowed to be acknowledged when that is the case.
The dog lady was banned from publication until the angry editor died! Overkill IMO as I see no fraud there. Fortunately when she was up for tenure she got it, with the tenure committee finding regarding the dog issue that the coauthorship was legitimate because "It was a real dog [a frequent lab visitor] and they said it had done no less research than some other coauthors had."
In the Korean case the article notes that after an 2018 audit of 82 papers with child coauthors they were able to determine that about half the children named had participated in the research. So at least that half were legitimately credited. The article then notes that currently 549 papers with child authorship have been reviewed, and only 24 were found to have unjustified authorship. Only 24 of 549 papers with child authors! That's only 4% of papers with child authors being unjustified. What percentage of papers without child authors give unjustified credit? Is it more than 4%? Perhaps! And certainly so for the field of ghostcredited pharmaceutical papers, a known huge problem. It's possible that papers with child authors are even less likely to have unjustified authorship than papers in general.
[+] [-] sgillen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fhennig|6 years ago|reply
I think we should allow to water down the term 'Author'.
[+] [-] LegitShady|6 years ago|reply