ELKH-DE Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Department of Evolutionary Zoology, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary.
PLoS One. 2022 Oct 26;17(10):e0270618. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270618. eCollection 2022.
The present processes of research assessment, i.e. focusing on one or a few, related, scientometrics, foster questionable authorship practices, like gifting authorship to non-contributing people. An especially harmful one of these unethical practices is the formation of publication cartels, where authors offer gift authorship to each other reciprocally. Here, by developing a simple model and a simulation of the publication process I investigate how beneficial cartels can be and what measure can be used to restrict them. My results indicate that publication cartels can significantly boost members' productivity even if paper counts are weighted by the inverse of author number (the 1/n rule). Nevertheless, applying the 1/n rule generates conflicts of interest both among cartel members themselves and between cartel members and non-members which might lead to the self-purification of the academic publishing industry.
目前的研究评估过程，即关注一个或几个相关的科学计量学，助长了有问题的作者署名做法，例如将作者署名给予没有做出贡献的人。这些不道德做法中特别有害的一种是出版卡特尔的形成，作者之间相互赠送作者署名。在这里，通过开发一个简单的模型和对出版过程的模拟，我研究了出版卡特尔可以带来多大的好处，以及可以采取什么措施来限制它们。我的结果表明，即使按作者人数的倒数（1/n 规则）对论文数量进行加权，出版卡特尔也可以显著提高成员的生产力。然而，应用 1/n 规则会在卡特尔成员之间以及卡特尔成员和非成员之间产生利益冲突，这可能导致学术出版行业的自我净化。
