Results and Discussion
Most productive researchers
The database contains 195,605 authors from 1834 until 2022. This study only focuses on authors who are productive and thus only select authors whose first publication was post 1990. The number of papers published per year was calculated for each author: np/[2022 – first year publication]. The distribution is heavily skewed ranging from 0.01 to 220. According to [1], authors who had published more than 72 papers per year is considered implausibly prolific. Because the total number of papers per year is averaged over a long period, this study considers an average 30 papers per year as implausibly prolific. There are only 894 authors (or 0.46% of the database) that exceed publishing an average 30 papers per year,
Table 1 produces top 20 most productive authors. It is impressive to note that some authors who wrote 70-220 papers over the length of their careers. A deeper analysis reveals that some of the authors (Table 1) are editors from journals. The most prolific author is Elisabeth Mahase, a news reporter at The BMJ, and Scopus considers the news article as “peer review” articles and she has topped most authors in scientific output. Other authors from BMJ include Gareth Iacobucci from BMJ, Abi Rimmer, etc. Most productive non journalist author is Viroj Wiwanitkit who managed to pump out, on average, 146 papers per year. Two prolific authors who have a high c rank are from Aalborg university, Gregory Lip with 116 papers per year and Frede Blaabjerg at 89 papers per year. Other prolific authors came from various countries, including USA, Saudi Arabia, and India.
While not in the top 20, Table 1 includes John P.A. Ioannidis, who has critically published about hyperprolific authors. Ioannidis himself, on average since 1994, publishes 45 papers per year. According to Scopus, in 2016-2021, Ioannidis published 52-80 papers paper year, or on average 1 paper over 5 days, “a figure that many would consider implausibly prolific” [1, 7].
Table 1. Most productive researchers according to the Stanford database.