What's this about?
Andrew Gelman's blog notes that a University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far — a rate of roughly one every twenty hours including weekends.
How is that arithmetically possible?
Through honorary and courtesy authorship, which is normal in some fields: a lab head is listed on everything their group produces, or a senior figure is added for access to data or funding. At sufficient scale, authorship stops signalling "wrote this" and starts signalling "was adjacent to this". The number is remarkable not because anyone believes he wrote them, but because it makes visible how far the signal has drifted from the thing it is supposed to measure.
What's the community saying?
155 likes, 27 retweets
- The reaction is mostly about incentives — publication counts drive hiring, tenure and funding, so the metric gets optimised.
- Placed beside Mollick's slop-papers post the same day, the picture is a system under pressure from both ends: fabricated authorship from outside, inflated authorship from inside.
- Gelman's blog has been documenting this genre for years, which is worth knowing before reading it as a one-off.