More than a dozen universities have used "questionable authorship practices" to inflate their publication metrics, authors of a new study, published January 5 in Quantitative Science Studies, say. One university even saw an increase in published articles of nearly 1,500% in the last four years.

Meho and Akl used data from Elsevier’s SciVal, Scopus, and Clarivate’s Web of Science to identify 80 universities that experienced growth in research output, as measured by number of published journal articles, of over 100% from 2019 to 2023 – far outpacing the global average of 20%. Of these, 14 institutions also had declines in rates of first authorship of more than 15 percentage points over four years.

Researchers also looked at hyperprolific authorship, defining it as publishing 40 or more articles annually. Combined, the 14 universities had an increase in hyperprolific authors from 23 in 2019 to 177 in 2023, an increase of 670% and a growth rate 10 times the average.

Another high-profile case has interested scientists. Read now