Wow: "The chemist admitted that since December, he has been using the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to “polish” his texts. “These months have been quite productive, because there are articles that used to require two or three days and now I do them in one day,” he said. "
-- from Le Pais: https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-04-02/one-of-the-worlds-most-cited-scientists-rafael-luque-suspended-without-pay-for-13-years.html
Is it normal in chemistry to publish on average one paper every 37 hours?
I am aware that it is probably not normal - but is it anywhere close to believable (as in, the papers are significant and the author understands what is in them) ?
@FMarquardtGroup In 37 hours you're lucky enough if you're able to run a reaction; and that's without accounting for deciding what to do, planning it, and cleaning up afterwards. Moreover, in most cases the reaction just won't work and you'll have to try again.
No, publishing an article every 37 hours is nowhere near believable.
I believe someone who is very knowledgeable of a topic could just keep writing articles about that topic, however I don't see what significant new idea he could come up from one day to the other. All articles may be well written and sensed, but pretty much containing the same information.
That said, I'll read one of his articles and come back with a more informed opinion.
@rastinza Very interesting, thank you. What you say is consistent with some observations in the El Pais article, such as him not knowing all of the co-authors and editing the paper of some other student etc
@FMarquardtGroup So, I took a look at a couple papers. The research at a first glance seems legit and moderately novel; it's experimental work.
Definitely he was not doing the experiments, I just skimmed through a paper in which the experimental part clearly took at the very least one month.
He may have taken part in the revision of the article, if you look at the articles he published it's immediately clear that he has a bunch of different authors in all the articles and those are almost never the same, while you would generally expect one running a research group to publish papers more or less with the same people.
Something is quite shady, I guess he's offering to edit articles to smaller researcher in order to place his name there and increase the rating of the publication.