I'm not a researcher or academic, but when I think of roughly how long it takes me to do meaningful deep work and produce a project of any significance, I'm struck by the fact that his 800 papers isn't a red flag? Even if you allocate ~3 months per paper, that's over 200 years of work. Is it common for academics to produce research papers in a matter of days?
From the article:
Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The physician and neuropathologist conducted research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for decades, and his drive, curiosity, and productivity propelled him into the top ranks of scholars on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field.
It's kind of like, when reporters say a CEO built [insert ridiculously complex product here], ex: ascribing the success of OpenAI to Sam Altman, or Apple to Steve Jobs. Sure there were important in setting the direction, and allocating resources but they didn't actually do the work.
Similarly, the heads of famous science labs have lots of talented scientists who want to work with them. The involvement of a lab director varies wildly, but for the hyper productive, famous ones, it's largely the director curating great people, providing scientific advice, and setting a general research direction. The lab director gets named on all these papers that get generated from this process.
So 800 papers isn't necessarily a red flag if the director is great at fundraising and has lots of graduate students/post docs doing the heavy lifting.
More than likely many of those authorships were "honorary", that is Masliah "lent" his (once-famous) name to help others publish their own work. He likely provided little actual contribution to many of these papers.
As such one would normally only give an author "full" credit (and responsibility) if they appear as either first or last in the list of authors. In the biosciences these are the positions indicating substantial contributions to the published work.
His co-authors are now going to be very annoyed as association with this "honorary" author will now cast doubt upon their own work.
Over 20 years, that’s 40 per year on average. He’s emeritus from UCSD and I don’t see his old lab page online, not sure how big it was. But my PI’s lab had 13 last year and has 11 people. If Masliah had around 33 people that would be a pretty normal papers per capita.
Most neuroscience papers of the type Masliah published are the result of at least 2 person-years of hands-on work (and up to 10 or 15 person-years for large papers).
800 papers over 25 years would therefore need a minimum staff of 64 full time researchers for the entirety of those 25 years. Masliah didn't have this.
For most papers on which Masliah is an author, the majority of the work will have been performed in other labs, with Masliah and those under him contributing to a greater or lesser extent. Such collaborative work is not a bad thing (assuming everyone is honest).
Web.archive has a shot of his now-deleted lab page:
Among other things my physics career taught me: anyone who is listed as an author on more than 200 papers is almost definitely a plagiarist, in the sense of a manager who adds his or her name to the papers of the underlings in his or her lab. When I was still bothering to go to conferences I would sometimes have fun with them (the male variety is easy to spot: look for the necktie) by asking detailed questions about the methodology of the research. They never have any idea how the work was actually done.
> Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX.
CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.
Owner, CTO and Executive Chairman of X (formerly Twitter).
Founder of The Boring Company, X Corp., and xAI.
Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and X.com (part of PayPal)
Depends on your definition of fraud. Musk is obviously not chief engineer of SpaceX while actively working at Twitter, Tesla, and Neuralink. The founding claims aren’t that unbelievable though, founding 10 companies in 30 years isn’t that hard.
I would call it heavy exaggeration.
Yet, he is able to answer most of deep technical questions related to his technologies, right on the spot. And his answers are well thought, concise and factual, i.e. not the handwavy crap you can expect from a CEO of his scale.
This also seems like a problematic practice. Perhaps we should start expecting a shorter author list, and have separate credit for advisers, small contributions, overseeing, etc.
From the article: Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The physician and neuropathologist conducted research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for decades, and his drive, curiosity, and productivity propelled him into the top ranks of scholars on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field.