Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a staff writer at Science magazine, has written an elegant article in the New York Times about the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel. The scientific misconduct of Stapel, including fabrication of data for at least 30 publications, outraged the scientific community a couple of years ago. At that time Stapel was the dean of the social and behavioral sciences faculty at the Tilburg university. He returned his [cum laude] Ph.D. title to the University of Amsterdam in November 2011, noting that his “behavior of the past years are inconsistent with the duties associated with the doctorate.”

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The scientific community keeps on finding new ways to facilitate to judge scientists. The old-fashioned way of reading her papers, listening to her talks,  interviewing her for more than an hour, reading recommendation letters, and consulting colleagues personally takes way too much time.

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Surviving in science these days is all about high impact. How is this impact being measured? Managers, deans,  operators, science editors and grant officers, to mention just a few non-active scientists, know the answer exactly. They judge the scientist by the:

1. number of papers published in refereed journals
2. number of papers in high-impact journals
3. number of citations, and more specifically by the h-index

To remind you: if the h-index of a scientist is 20 the scientist has coauthored 20 papers with at least 20 citations.

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Being an author of a scientific paper is still the most secure building bock of a scientific career and a way to recognition. As a result people fight to be on the author list and are disappointed – if not angry – when they feel that they are left out for no good reason.

The criteria for earning a coauthorship  differ from discipline to discipline and from country to country. It is not uncommon for a director of a big institute to have a publication list of over a thousand entries. It is clear that he cannot even have read all those papers.

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