Featured Image: In 2023, more than 450 scientists who had begun publishing research only in the previous eight years were among the ranks of most-cited researchers. Credit: Getty

The number of ‘precocious’ scientists — those who become top-cited authors early in their careers — has surged in the past few years, according to an analysis of the publishing records of hundreds of thousands of scientists.

Many of these precocious authors publish what the analysis calls an ‘extreme’ number of papers — an average of more than one per week. The analysis also found that these authors often cite their own papers at a rate well above the average. Some level of such ‘self-citation’ is common in scientific papers, but the average rate is around 13%, whereas some of these authors’ rates were 25–50%.

The analysis was posted on the bioRxiv preprint server on 15 October and has not yet been peer reviewed. However, another researcher who was not an author of the analysis says its methods seem sound.

Some of the precocious authors show no signs of questionable publishing habits and probably made it on to the list through talent and hard work, says John Ioannidis, the author of the preprint and a physician at Stanford University in California who specializes in meta-research, the study of how research is done.

But scientists say the trend raises questions about how so many authors have racked up such a large number of citations so quickly.

Zach Adelman, an entomologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, says that although there are probably true overachievers in the mix, “I don’t think that we’re all of a sudden mass-producing more geniuses now than we were five years ago.”