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“You just cannot trust someone who is publishing ten papers a year in top journals.”

This line from a brilliant New Yorker essay about the current scandals in behavioural economics immediately jumped out to me from the page (context attached below). I’ve thought for a while about doing a project scraping Google Scholar data to test my hypothesis that the upper bounds of productivity have been steadily increasing over the last few years, perhaps jump started by the pandemic. I’ve been loosely following a cohort of professors I’ve stumbled across through various means and watched the number of papers they publish annual increase over multiple years. In one case an academic is publishing 45+ papers per year!

This issue is an absolute minefield and I’m wary of making some powerful enemies but I’m convinced something interesting is happening here; though I should stres that I am not implying that there is anything necessarily corrupt about hyper-productivity. Instead my point is that cases of malpractice need to be seen alongside a broader culture of hyperproductivity.

Gino drew admiring notice from those who could not believe her productivity. The business-school professor said, “She’s not just brilliant and successful and wealthy—she has been a kind, fun person to know. She was well liked even by researchers who were skeptical of her work.” But she drew less admiring notice, too—also from people who could not believe her productivity. As one management scholar told me, “You just cannot trust someone who is publishing ten papers a year in top journals.” Other co-authors, as collateral beneficiaries, weren’t sure what to think. One former graduate student thought that she caught Gino plagiarizing portions of a literature review, but tried to convince herself that it was an honest error. Later, in a study for a different paper, “Gino was, like, ‘I had an idea for an additional experiment that would tie everything together, and I already collected the data and wrote it up—here are the results.’ ” The former graduate student added, “My adviser was, like, ‘Did you design the study together? No. Did you know it was going to happen? No. Has she sent you the data? No. Something off is happening here.’ ” (Gino declined to address these allegations on the record.)

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