In search of an author

While Smith's author once had a life, the same cannot be said of Ike Antkare, who had 102 publications to his name and an h-index of 94 in April 2010, making him the world's 21st most-cited scientist.There is no Ike Antkare and there never has been ( Labb, 2020), though he continues to publish (e.g., Antkare, 2020).A dog, a hamster, a parrot and chimpanzees have all been listed as academic authors ( Penders and Shaw, 2020).Even Larry the Cat has 144 citations and an h-index of 12 ( Richardson, 2024).This casual approach to academic authorship seems to have been encouraged by the profusion of ghost, gift, guest, and honorary authors who decorate academic papers.Managers of this, heads of that, friends of friends, people of power and influence, all reckoned -not least by themselves -to be entitled to authorship.In Medicine, author order is taken very seriously, authors struggling desperately -and oddly -to be last.In other disciplines, particularly Physics, authorship is so promiscuous that order scarcely matters, obscured by dozens of names, sometimes hundreds, occasionally thousands of authors who know neither each other nor, in all probability, who wrote the paper.Some author lists are longer than the papers they adorn.The title pages of many an academic paper have come to resemble a curriculum vitae so thick are they with authors, each with its own following of institutional affiliations.Ambitious universities wishing to rise in the rankings can simply buy affiliation by recruiting highly cited authors and thus acquiring their citations.Floreat Saudi Arabia.The going rate is something like US$70,000 a year, with no more than a week or so actually spent in the desert.Of 6,849 authors on the Highly Cited Researchers list of 2023, over 1,000 have been deemed fraudulent, up from 550 in 2022 and 300 in 2021 (see Jack, 2022).Gaming is universal.A sonic impression of a relatively modest 73 papers a year (you can see it here at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25134926.v1)reduces a year's production to ten seconds of electronic whooshing and seems to demonstrate just how far authorship has deviated from scholarship ( Bornmann and Ganser, 2025).Academics can now buy instant authorship online, rates varying by journal and place on the author list.Or they can simply pay an exorbitant article processing charge to an academic publisher who will publish almost anything almost immediately, no questions asked.Disappearing from an author list is just as easy; accused of plagiarism, one first author responded: 'After careful checking, I noticed that I am not the author of this paper despite my first authorship since it has been written by our previous medical writer.' (Romaric Loffroy as quoted in Joelving, 2023). Lengthening author lists have fuelled speculation about what