text:
Is there an inflation in the number of authors per paper?
In most (or at least many) fields of academia, peer-reviewed publications are essential.  For a compilation thesis, no papers means no PhD.  For tenure, you need papers.  To get grants, you need papers.  Universities may distribute internal funds based on the number of papers per group.  In short: publish or perish.
On the other hand, it is quite cheap to offer someone co-authorship.  Send a nearly finished manuscript to a colleague/friend at another university for review... colleague reads it, offers some advice, perhaps just minor.  First author offers co-authorship in return, and colleague has another co-authored paper for possibly less than a day of work.  One can discuss if it is the right thing to do, but that is not my question here.  It happens.  (NB: I am not suggesting such has happened in the examples listed below!)
Criteria for co-authorship differ per field, but some papers have a lot of co-authors.  Perhaps due to having an instrument that was used in an inter-comparison/validation study.  Some examples of papers with lots of co-authors, not particularly extreme:

Kasai, Y., Sagawa, H., Kreyling, D., Dupuy, E., Baron, P., Mendrok, J., Suzuki, K., Sato, T. O., Nishibori, T., Mizobuchi, S., Kikuchi, K., Manabe, T., Ozeki, H., Sugita, T., Fujiwara, M., Irimajiri, Y., Walker, K. A., Bernath, P. F., Boone, C., Stiller, G., von Clarmann, T., Orphal, J., Urban, J., Murtagh, D., Llewellyn, E. J., Degenstein, D., Bourassa, A. E., Lloyd, N. D., Froidevaux, L., Birk, M., Wagner, G., Schreier, F., Xu, J., Vogt, P., Trautmann, T., and Yasui, M.: Validation of stratospheric and mesospheric ozone observed by SMILES from International Space Station, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 6, 2311-2338, doi:10.5194/amt-6-2311-2013, 2013.

Milz, M., Clarmann, T. v., Bernath, P., Boone, C., Buehler, S. A., Chauhan, S., Deuber, B., Feist, D. G., Funke, B., Glatthor, N., Grabowski, U., Griesfeller, A., Haefele, A., Höpfner, M., Kämpfer, N., Kellmann, S., Linden, A., Müller, S., Nakajima, H., Oelhaf, H., Remsberg, E., Rohs, S., Russell III, J. M., Schiller, C., Stiller, G. P., Sugita, T., Tanaka, T., Vömel, H., Walker, K., Wetzel, G., Yokota, T., Yushkov, V., and Zhang, G.: Validation of water vapour profiles (version 13) retrieved by the IMK/IAA scientific retrieval processor based on full resolution spectra measured by MIPAS on board Envisat, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 2, 379-399, doi:10.5194/amt-2-379-2009, 2009.

(Again, I would like to stress than I am absolutely not implying that there is anything inappropriate about these two examples!)
On the other hand, I rarely see papers written by sole authors, and I have the impression that such papers were more common in the past — but I have no evidence thereof.
Is there an inflation in the number of authors per paper?  In other words, is the number of authors per paper increasing and if so, does this reduce the value of a co-authored publication?
Related: What is the average number of articles written per author in a year and has it increased recently?

Very much related: Who all are considered authors of papers written on behalf of a research group?.

When it comes to a massive list of authors, don't miss this one about Foldit, which probably has many thousands.

STOC 2013 had 14% single author papers, 37% with two authors, 31% three authors, 10% with four authors and 7% with five authors.  These numbers will also be correct if you ignore the % sign.

This is very much dependent on the field of study. In mathematics, most papers seem to have 1-3 authors; in theoretical computer science (my field), 2-4 seems to be the norm; in more practical areas of computer science, it's a little higher still but mostly fewer than 10 (these numbers are just my impression). On the other hand, I was talking to somebody in the humanities recently, who wold me that single-author papers are so predominant that some journal submission web forms don't even have an input box for co-authors.

I rarely see papers written by sole authors — I am the sole author of about 20% of my papers.

The AIR had something about this a while back.... apparently in 2009 the record was 2512 authors, taking up 19 pages before the content of the paper started! In 2003 a paper won an IgNobel prize for having 100 times more authors than pages :-) http://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/jan/20/improbable-science-marc-abrahams

@Flyto Hah.  When downloading a bibtex citation for the 2003 IgNobel prize paper, the author field is simply missing.

I heard a scheme (presumably intended as humor) like this.  If a paper has 5 authors, then each author should count it as 1/5 of a paper.

I take inflation to mean that the number of co-authors grows faster than what the content/effort of the research merits: that would imply that if there is a non-negligible amount of such an inflation, it does affect the value of the authorship.

Number of co-authors per paper is increasing
Co-authorship inflation is perceived as a problem
Perceived amount of contribution depends greatly on the position in the author list: first, last and corresponding author are perceived as contributing much, middle authors are perceived as contributing only a bit.

Long version:
First of all, the number of coauthors per paper is clearly increasing, e.g. PubMed provides statics about such questions:

Let me mainly take the optimistic position and list sensible valid reasons for increasing numbers of coauthors.
Some are well known and widely discussed

large combined scientific efforts like big instrumentation, the practical implementation of such long author lists widely and somewhat controversially discussed.

Increasingly interdisciplinary research

But I think that also the density of researchers has increased, which greatly facilitates collaboration.
E.g. I'm in a 100 000 inhabitant university town. The university has about 20 000 students and 7 000 employees (incl. professors - not sure whether this count includes technical personnel or only research staff). That alone is more than the whole town had inhabitants in 1900. Plus we also have a university of applied sciences and a number of non-university research institutes. I'm in of those research institutes, with about 300 employees.  So there are several thousand researchers with whom I can collaborate even person to person by bicycle/foot.
This high concentration of researchers facilitates intra- as well as interdisciplinary collaboration. These papers then naturally have more co-authors. Say, an "instrumentation" group develops a customized sensor for a group tackling some application and yet other people develop the data analysis for the paper.

In addition, email, Skype and cheap travel (plus I'm in the luxurious position that there are basically no legal travel restrictions as I'm German and EU citizen) makes it much easier than, say, 30 years ago to know, meet and collaborate with colleagues from all over the world.

Specialization, particularly now that I'm at such a big institute.
E.g. where I'm now I usually receive readily prepared samples for measurements. Actually, being specialized on data analysis I often receive just the measured data (and I'm very lucky if people bother to have a chat beforehand on the design of experiments with me). Someone else prepares the samples and someone who mainly works on instrument development does the measurements. On contrast, where I was before everyone did all of that for their own topic and samples (of course also having emphasis on some part of this work flow). Of course all these people here contribute significantly to the paper.
But it also means that there is a continuous distribution size of contributions. I've somewhere seen a notion that weights the papers by 1/total no. of authors.

Of course, also abuse of co-authorship, such as honorary authorship, does happen, and maybe the specialization can become a salami-slicing of contributions.
I very much like the possibility of including a "contributions" section and decided to do that whenever possible. I think it can help checking against the abuse. At the moment (in my field), I think the existence of such a paragraph alone is a quite strong sign of no abuse of co-authorship.
But I think there are also valid reasons that mean that nowadays more authors are on a paper without the amount of work of the different persons involved having changed:

Nowadays, sometimes technicians who did a lot of the work (and often also contribute to the development of the lab methodology) are mentioned.

Also I believe that students who do research nowadays have a far better chance to end up on the author list.

Maybe a gray zone, which also depends on customs/tradition is how to deal with the higher-up levels of supervision:

Vancouver says: providing funding alone is not sufficient (and of course the DFG goes along the same lines)
German tradition says: head of the institute is responsible for all that is going on in his/her institute, and thus is always included.
To be clear here: this does not mean (and AFAIK has never meant) only an organizational responsibility, but a scientific responsibility, i.e. supervision of the project. The gray zone IMHO comes from the fact that the proper contribution can superficially look similar to improper (i.e. no proper contribution) -- it is difficult to judge from the outside: A very good supervisor may guide in a way that is hardly perceived. If this good supervisor is looking after a good student, after putting his intellectual facilities to the project may find that the good student does well, and not many changes are needed. This is a proper contribution. Yet it superficially can look very similar to a bad supervisor who does not contribute his intellect to the project or paper and just waves everything through - regardless of whether the input is good or not.

I think this paper is interesting:
Wren et al.: The write position. A survey of perceived contributions to papers based on byline position and number of authors,
EMBO Rep. 2007, 8(11), 988–991.
DOI:  10.1038/sj.embor.7401095
PMCID: PMC2247376

In addition, we also asked respondents for their perception of general trends and attitudes towards authorship of scientific publications. Forty per cent of the respondents (35/87), for example, agreed that granting authorship to someone who does not meet journal authorship criteria was a common occurrence. Half of the respondents also agreed that author inflation makes it significantly harder to judge whether or not a candidate merits promotion.

While this does not answer the question whether there objectively is an inflation in co-authorship, it means that this is at the very least widely suspected and perceived as a problem.
Also, the outcome of that paper IMHO boils down to: perceived as authors are the first, last and corresponding authors, the middle authors are generally perceived far less.
Personally, I share the suspicion that a significant amount of co-authorship abuse happens. However, my field is small and I think I have a reasonably good overview of what is going on. This includes a (subjective) idea of where I'd suspect honorary authorship or small contributions and on the other hand also some idea of who likely contributed what (specializations) to the paper. In addition, of course the listing of the institutions makes a lot of that clear (e.g. if someone from a statistics department, someone from a clinic and someone from a spectroscopy lab is listed that gives me a very good guess who
did what).

Interesting points.  When I asked the question, I only thought of "bad inflation", with researchers giving co-authorship to people not properly deserving it.  But it is equally possible that the bar previously was too high, with students doing the bulk of the work not even getting co-authorship (let alone first-authorship).  So we should probably separate between an increased number of authors/paper for good reasons (crediting real contributions, increasing research complexity, etc.) from an increase for bad reasons (being too easy with giving co-authorship for tiny contributions).

I am happy to see that there's some acknowledgement that current trends such as ease of collaboration are mentioned in the answer. In my research group, anyone who has an intellectual contribution (even with respect to analysis) receives authorship credit, which generally leads to long author lists as well.

"German tradition says..." This tradition is a clear violation of the DFG Proposals for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice (pp.82f). With each and every grant proposal one submits to the DFG (German Research Council) one signs strict adherence to them. This should be mentioned quite explicit in your (very good!) answer. Maybe even cite some parts from p83 of the DFG document, which gives a good overview on the many common reasons that do not constitute an authorship.

Please, either show a median, or use another statistical method that disregards extremal values, like the 3sigma criterion. We all know that there are exceptional papers with thousands of authors, and these significantly modify the statistics.

@Daniel: I clarified the point: this tradition as I perceive it implies supervision which is a contribution to the scientific content. BUT (and this is where my notion of a gray zone comes from): it can be hard to distinguish from the outside how much the supervisor actually contributed. Thus the tradition leaves a loophole for bad supervisors to slip in as co-author whereas I think it is meant to say that the director of a department should indeed contribute by default to all projects that go on under his/her direction. (IMHO (s)he may opt out)

@tohecz: go ahead and put in another graph. However, I admit that as the average is readily available both as graph and table in the public domain I'm too lazy to dig through the whole of the pubmed data base and aggregate it in a nicer way. Note however, that while there are a few papers in the biomedical field with extreme numbers of authors, this isn't nearly as often as say with experimental particle physics. Besides, I'm not sure whether the median is a better measure here: as author numbers come in integers, the median will jump...

Well, the DFG Proposals are pretty explicit about this (p 83): "Neither the position of institute director and supervisor nor former supervisor justify designation as co-author."

@Daniel: sure - not on itself, we completely agree on that. But it may (possibly also depending on the field) imply the duty to contribute significantly  to (other people may say: care about) the projects. Which is the actual thing that merits co-authorship. At least in my field (I know that in maths the view on co-authorship is often different - to the extreme opnion that supervisors who contribute significantly should not become co-authors (http://mathoverflow.net/questions/57337/when-should-a-supervisor-be-a-co-author/57339#57339)). I think we're getting somewhat off-topic:

there are alredy lots of questions that answer "who should be co-author" (even with particular respect to supervisors), and so do the Vancouver as well as the DFG guidelines. This question is about how often such abuse of coauthorship happens - and the point in question is one where I think we both agree that there is the possibility of abuse (which in practice also means that it will be abused).

Agreed :-) I think, my main point was that whenever we refer to the unholy "German tradition," we should point out very explicitly that it has become highly disregarded.

Is there an inflation in the number of authors per paper? In other words, is the number of authors per paper increasing and if so, does this reduce the value of a co-authored publication?

Bit late but somewhat inspired by this question I did some research on author inflation within PLOS journals (due to their nice API).
The full write-up is here, should you be interested, but the TL;DR is that author inflation does indeed appear to be happening, at least in this selection of journals mostly from the life sciences in recent years.
Here are linear regressions per journal of yearly mean number of authors per paper:

In one of the comments I was linked to a much longer-term study which revealed the same trend in a prominent chemistry journal.
The second part of your question is harder to answer but cbeleites has given some good insight and references. +1 for a very interesting question.

+1 for sharing, especially with the blog post and code.!

"On the other hand, I rarely see papers written by sole authors"
A lot depends on the field you are researching. In the sciences you'll often find papers written by 6+ authors - probably because they're a collaborative effort between a team which might be spread across several institutions. In the arts, however, it's not uncommon to find single author articles - especially in fields such as classics and ancient history. If you look at the publications by staff in that department at the University of Manchester you'll find many single author papers:
http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/classicsancienthistory/people/
Looking through the 100+ publications I cited in my ancient history articles, I can find only one which had more than one author, whereas in my computer science thesis there were only 12 with one author - most of which were unreviewed technical reports.

Seems that mathematics is closer to arts than science in one more aspect than I already new.

There are two types of dangers when it comes to publishing as a basis for evaluations. One is certainly as you mention more authors included although they have not fulfilled the basic criteria as for example outlined by the Vancouver protocol. A second effect is so-called salami-slicing where the results are sliced to produce as many publications as possible. There are tendencies such as these and journals have started to act against the by requesting disclosure of contributions by the authors. Salami-slicing should be corrected through the review process and may be more difficult to identify since reviewers and editors do not know the full extent of any particular project.
Against all this is the fact that science has over roughly the past century (different in different disciplines) steadily moved towards larger groups and consortia performing research. This results in many co-authors, particularly on papers synthesizing results from the larger projects. The number of authors have therefore increased but due o several and opposing reasons.
The value of co-authorship has therefore also changed over time. I believe the view of co-authorship varies between disciplines, maybe even a lot. In the disciplines with which I am familiar authorship alone is not sufficient to value a paper. For better or worse, we also look at the impact factor to try to assess the value of co-authorship. This means it may be possible to value a co-authorship of one key paper as more valuable than first authorship of another more run-of-the-mill paper. What this implies is that valuations are not necessarily simple arithmetic although that is certainly how it is often treated. In terms of a thesis, there was a time, not too long ago (when I finished my PhD), when single authorship was looked as the only acceptable form but now, it is a rarity. we do however, require all papers to be listed with a detailed author contribution.
Clearly the main problem is different kinds of free authorships. as this becomes common so will actions to reduce the problem. Top journals have started this and I am sure many others will follow. At the same time the reasons for "cheating" must also be reduced which puts responsibility on persons evaluating applications where publications constitute a basis for decisions.

"authorship alone is not sufficient to value a paper" So, does that mean there is no benefit or drawback to having multiple authors (all else being equal)?

No. I have tried to improve my answer to hopefully shed some more light on the point you bring up. Essentially, I am saying that authorships are usually dealt with by applying simple counting whereas much more should be considered when valuing someone's publications.

As one of the authors of one of the two shown examples I can definitely say
that the long authors list is the result of a large cooperation: 19 of the
over 30 authors listed come from more than 10 internationally distributed
institutions. Validations are always large undertakings involving many data
sources from other groups, and each group has to do some work for such a
publication. Especially in the space/satellite segment, data acquisition and
result retrievals cannot be done by a few persons, these are decade long
processes with many people involved.
So the trend to many authors is just a reflection of the fact that research
is getting much more complex in effort, money, and material involved, the
times when sole researchers can produce scientific results of large impact
in their ivory towers are long gone. No surprise at all, and surely, not a
sign of some "science fraud"...

Hello, welcome to the site!  I suspect my question may have inadvertently left the suggestion of an implication of there being something inherently wrong with many co-authors.  Let me just stress I did not mean to imply this, and certainly not for the examples listed — I have now added a note to the question stating this explicitly.

After reading the following article, your count does not bring much of a surprise.

The paper, published in the journal
  G3: Genes Genomes Genetics, names 1,014 authors, with more
  than 900 undergraduate students among them.

The corresponding author was questioned as to whether everyone did make sufficient contribution.

The paper’s senior author,
  geneticist Sarah Elgin at Washington University in St. Louis,
  Missouri, says that large collaborations with correspondingly
  large author lists have become a fact of life
  in genomics research. “Putting together
  the efforts of many people allows you to
  do good projects,” she says.

If you really want a look at the paper, it is available here:
Leung, W., Shaffer, C. D., Reed, L. K., Smith, S. T., Barshop, W., Dirkes, W., ... & Yuan, H. (2015). Drosophila Muller F elements maintain a distinct set of genomic properties over 40 million years of evolution. G3: Genes| Genomes| Genetics, 5(5), 719-740.
Well, if 1014 isn't enough, then how about 5000+ authors:

Only the first nine pages in the 33-page article, published on 14 May in Physical Review Letters1, describe the research itself — including references. The other 24 pages list the authors and their institutions. (Ref.)

The paper has exactly 5,154 authors and is the paper to have the largest number of authors ever known. You can find that paper here:
Aad, G., Abbott, B., Abdallah, J., Abdinov, O., Aben, R., Abolins, M., ... & Abulaiti, Y. (2015). Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in p p Collisions at √s= 7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments. Physical Review Letters, 114(19), 191803.
Back to the question, does increase in the number of authors decrease the value of the co-authored publication?
The honest answer would be, it depends. It depends on the field of publication as well the impact of the research produced along with so many other factors.
Scientists are trying to popularise the word 'hyperauthorship' as an umbrella term to cover such papers.

The Higgs paper is special in two regards, as in that it combines the results of two different experiments and that it follows the tradition of the field to include 'ancillary' personel in seminal papers. My name is on there as a computing specialist, not a physicist, even though I am not on any other papers published by the experiments in question.


text:
Is voluntarily omitting to cite known relevant previous work a form of plagiarism, and what to do about repeated instances?
Consider the following scenario:

Person A and B start a collaboration, and discuss a variety of concepts over various months.
Person B ceases the collaboration, authorizing Person A to pursue the research alone.
Person A continues the research, finishes it, describes it in article P1, sending the draft to person B for approval of the depiction of their contribution in the acknowledgment paragraph.
Person B threatens person A with legal pursuits arguing of "pending patent". Conference committee says to ignore person B ("that is not how research works"). Article P1 is accepted.
Person A presents the article at the conference, with person B in attendance.
Two years later, person B publishes with other co-authors an article P2 presenting as theirs some of the concepts presented in P1, and failing to cite neither P1 nor person A.

Let's assume that 1) the concepts shared between P1 and P2 were person B's contribution to the discussion leading to article P1 (proving such things is a muddy issue, but it is likely to be person B's point of view?); that 2) person B "did not forget", and that 3) the concepts presented in the publications are a) the same and b) sufficiently important.
Is omitting to cite such specific previous work

a form of plagiarism,
a fault of ethics,
just "part of the academic game" (the exact words from a colleague), or
something else?

I am pondering what person A should do in such a situation. It seems easier to  let it go as part of the "game" of academia (and citing adequately both studies in future articles), hoping that karma or "an invisible hand" will insure that research will go on as desired. A colleague suggested that person A should hire a lawyer specialized in intellectual property (which seems quite extreme) and should request an academic leave to focus on such situation (which seems unlikely to be granted).
I am less worried about the fate of person A than about the trend from person B, in that failing to report on their actions could affect other (younger) researchers with whom they would "collaborate" in the future (thinking about an awkward parallel with work or sexual harassment victims failing to fill a complaint being a disservice to future victims).

The details of this story get to be quite convoluted and seem to address one very specific case; can you try to distill it into a single, answerable question that would apply to more than one situation and lead to a general guideline? I don't think we need notation to discuss papers numbered IDs 1-6.

I agree with Bryan, I'm not reading all that

Removed the mention of the other articles.

Unfortunately, this kind of situation does happen, and in fact something similar happened to me (I'd never worked with my person B, but they proved some of the same results, either independently or based on a preprint I had shared with them, and then for years have tried to bury my work, not cite it, and even tell others not to cite it). I'll write this answer aimed at person A.
To answer your question, I would say this is a fault of ethics but is not plagiarism and really should not be "part of the academic game." I think we should all do our parts to steer academia away from this kind of behavior.
It is certainly not worth hiring a lawyer to fight about it. It does not look good to squabble. Generally speaking, the best approach is to move on, publish lots of good work, and earn lots of citations, even if B never cites your work.
In math, it's basically impossible to write a truly comprehensive literature review (e.g., going back to Euclid's axioms). Authors pick and choose who to cite, so it's very unlikely that an academic misconduct case could stick (person B could just say they didn't feel like papers P1-P4 had merit). It is good if you cite relevant papers that your reader might like to read. By not citing you, person B is doing a bad job as author. In an ideal world, your work would be well-known enough that referees would force person B to cite your work. Failing that, you can at least take comfort knowing that senior people who are aware of all the papers, will view person B's behavior as childish and unprofessional. Person A did the right thing to acknowledge person B and that does count for a lot (more than a few citations, I would argue). If person B's behavior becomes a trend, it will be noticed and their career will suffer for it. Best to put it out of your mind and move on to other exciting research projects. "Living well is the best revenge."

We agree. My only doubt is inspired by the "#MeToo" movement. For a long time, the system was making it very difficult for victims of (sexual and work) harassment (and worse) to put forward a complaint, leaving (sex predators and) bullies free to assault one person after the other without any form of punishment, and to call the public wrath against any single individual accusing them. The #MeToo movement changed this a bit, and pushed for systems were such complaints could be made anonymously and revealed once a given number of them against the same person were registered.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


text:
Is there formal data demonstrating that academic pressures has been increasing over time?
QUESTION:
Is there formal data demonstrating that academic pressures (e.g. "publish or perish") has been increasing over time? Did anybody draw a rough calendar of which laws and rules changed at which time, resulting in the rise of such academic pressure?
CONTEXT:
In some universities of my (current) country of residence (Chile), various bibliometrics-based restrictions (as opposed to checking the content of a research or research proposal) are exerted on academics and students to insure they publish (e.g. an academic needs to have published 7 journal articles in "Web of Science" journals in the last 5 years in order to be allowed to direct a PhD student; a PhD student must have published two such journal articles before being allowed to defend; a Master student must have submitted two such journal articles before being allowed to defend), in addition to various incentives (e.g. bonus salary money from various entities for each article published into such a journal). Such coercive measures and incentives have increased over time (e.g. the threshold to be allowed to guide PhD students used to be 5 articles in the last 5 years, the monetary amounts paid for each publication is regularly increased, etc.).
World-wide, the "publish and perish" pressure of academia has been cited as a cause for various cases of scientific fraud, and it is my understanding that it is seen as having increased over time, but I could not find any formal claim to that.
For a study of malpractices encouraged by "publish or perish" policies, I would like to document formally whether academic policies have increased the pressure to publish on academics, and whether such change of policies can be correlated with observable changes in academic behaviors (e.g. as was done in the article Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: A country-level comparative analysis for Italian publications regarding one Italian regulation).

First, your example shows that pressure may have become more formalized, not that it has increased. Publish or Perish was the rule long before my career began fifty years ago.

Second, your example is pretty specialized. I would expect a lot of experience to be required before a faculty member could be the lead supervisor of a doctoral student. That is a bit different from overall publish or perish pressure. Some junior faculty would even welcome such a rule so that they don't have to take on that responsibility until they mature into the field.

@Buffy Those are the only examples where I can formally point that a parameter increased over time (nb of publications expected increasing from 5 to 7). In the university where I graduated (21 years ago), one was merely required to have co-guided a PhD student before being allowed to guide one: the fact that a committee was evaluating the content of the proposal was deemed a sufficient guarantee.

Plotting the number of academic job openings vs the number of PhDs produced per year may prove illuminating.

an academic needs ... to direct a PhD student ... a Master student must have submitted two such journal articles before being allowed to defend --- As I'm sure most everyone knows, requirements such as this result in highly variable standards in different fields. There is also the fact that books are more significant than journal articles in many humanities fields.

what can we say, this depends strongly on local conditions. For your country, the path has been a bumpy one, with some discrete jumps in the economical choices (which are political choice), where a bunch of self-assessed better people decided top-down what was the best way.
The long lasting effects of that experience is still here, the dynamics are here explained:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764220941214
In academy, the publish or perish is just generating noise.

"a Master student must have submitted two such journal articles before being allowed to defend" Pardon me, WTF? How can every (!) Master student be expected to produce sufficiently many sufficiently novel results for two journal papers? Am I missing or misunderstanding something important here?

@JochenGlueck "stay hungry stay foolish" is the rather mild idiotic idea you get if you are in the eye of the (capitalist darwinism) economic policies promoted by the US. If you are in the tornado path, you get Pinochet and its long-lasting reverberations...

@JochenGlueck I was/am as baffled as you are. And I was told that, given the lack of requirement for the papers being accepted (there is no time to wait for the refereeing process to take its course), "bad advisors" just submit "bad papers" in order to let their "bad students" to defend their master, knowing they will be rejected. It is frowned upon but considered a logical conclusion of the measure (the measure itself considered an aberration of the system that nobody can change).

There are studies of fraud rates, perhaps most recently reviewed in the lay press -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/09/scientific-misconduct-retraction-watch  -- The assertion there is that misconduct is, and has been,  more prevalent than one might guess.'

Is there formal data demonstrating that academic pressures (e.g. "publish or perish") has been increasing over time?

Possibly not. However, national research bodies (NSF, UKRI, NRF, CONICYT ...) would have data that can be innovatively mined/analysed to extract deeper nuances beyond the 'intended purpose'.
A challenge is also that 'indicators' are varied and not easy to pinpoint, although they are largely known: one of the question you listed has some of them - Are there studies of malpractices in Academia resulting from "publish or perish" policies?.
I know of places where the 'collussion' is prevalent openly (overtly) and in another place where it's covert.
One challenge that academic faced is getting the 'requisite' ethics clearance to undertake research in this area, especially longitudinal studies. Where given, the research gets overly 'narrow' or meta-data. We sure need metrics research and critical realism-based causal mechanisms research beyond the cause-and-effect research.

The following research might give further pointers. PS: There's one I'm trying to remember; I'll update when I do.
Kinman, G. (1998). Pressure points: A survey into the causes and consequences of occupational stress in UK academic and related staff (pp. 1-40). London: Association of University Teachers.
Miller, A. N., Taylor, S. G., & Bedeian, A. G. (2011). Publish or perish: Academic life as management faculty live it. Career development international, 16(5), 422-445.
Kinman, G., & Jones, F. (2003). 'Running Up the Down Escalator': Stressors and strains in UK academics. Quality in Higher education, 9(1), 21-38.
Lee, M., Coutts, R., Fielden, J., Hutchinson, M., Lakeman, R., Mathisen, B., ... & Phillips, N. (2022). Occupational stress in University academics in Australia and New Zealand. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 44(1), 57-71.
Suart, C., Neuman, K., & Truant, R. (2022). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on perceived publication pressure among academic researchers in Canada. PloS one, 17(6), e0269743.
Fink, M., Gartner, J., Harms, R., & Hatak, I. (2023). Ethical orientation and research misconduct among business researchers under the condition of autonomy and competition. Journal of business ethics, 183(2), 619-636.
Fanelli, D., Schleicher, M., Fang, F. C., Casadevall, A., & Bik, E. M. (2022). Do individual and institutional predictors of misconduct vary by country? Results of a matched-control analysis of problematic image duplications. PloS one, 17(3), e0255334.
Gopalakrishna, G., Ter Riet, G., Vink, G., Stoop, I., Wicherts, J. M., & Bouter, L. M. (2022). Prevalence of questionable research practices, research misconduct and their potential explanatory factors: A survey among academic researchers in The Netherlands. PloS one, 17(2), e0263023.
Poutoglidou, F., Stavrakas, M., Tsetsos, N., Poutoglidis, A., Tsentemeidou, A., Fyrmpas, G., & Karkos, P. D. (2022). Fraud and deceit in medical research: insights and current perspectives. Voices in Bioethics, 8.

Because academia is so broad, "pressure" can mean just about anything, and exact reasons people leave academia are not necessarily a matter of record (how does one know if a person who accepted a job outside academia would have preferred a job in academia??  How so you know for certain whether a faculty member left a department because they were denied tenure??), I have some doubt that you'll find a comprehensive reference.  You might some ongoing surveys that might prove useful.  For example, NSF used to track the careers of a subset of PhD recipients, and the data is at https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2021#survey-info.  With some work, you can probably find papers that cite that dataset.
Your answer might lie in simple math, though.  Assuming one can find an average number of academics who train PhD students, and then estimate how many offspring they sire who are looking for academic jobs, then assuming it's more that one, that means that "demand" for academic slots is growing exponentially.  Then, you can just track growth of the number of available academic slots.  If the growth rate of trainees is greater than the growth rate of slots, "pressure" is going up.

I don't undertand the claim that the "'demand' for academic slots is growing exponentially". If the generation n fills p(n) positions and each academic in this generation has, on average, f(n) off-springs looking for academic jobs, then the number of available candidates per position for the generation n+1 is f(n) p(n) / p(n+1). This numbers doesn't grow exponentially, unless f(n) does. In particular, f(n) > 1 does not imply exponential growth (it does not even imply any growth at all). (That's of course an oversimplified model, but I think it suffices to demonstrate my point.)

@JochenGlueck  yeah, you're right -- I didn't allow for the fact that there  aren't automatic positions created for the next generation, so the number of progenitors is ceilings at a cap for a given time.

Thanks for your response! (Funnily, if even such new positions were created at an exponential rate, while the number of candidates would indeed grow exponentially then, the job market would in fact become less competitive - since the ratio p(n)/p(n+1) would be less then 1 in this case. Ok, enough idle mathematical digression... ;-) )

In his videos (e.g. Why is academia so toxic? 6 insider bombshells, PhD Student Advice | 5 insider secrets no one tells you about, etc.)  Chemistry Doctor Andy Stapleton lists various issues in Academia and mentions for some of them how they evolve over time (especially in universities always want more). It is not formal enough to use as a reference for an academic study, but it might be a beginning.
Among the problems he mentions, I would highlight

Competitiveness
h-index
Peer review papers
Funding
Not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel
limited amounts of money
being first matters
metrics and comparison
the system creates toxic people
universities always want more
luck plays a huge role

I (or others) might add more links from his other videos (such as 6 Dirty Tactics Found In Academia & Universities | Watch out!)

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Is there any research on the prevalence of academic theft?
Some — perhaps many — academics seem to be very careful in keeping unpublished work secret.  It is not difficult to find anecdotes where academic ideas are stolen, such as in this post by @Markus.  Others, such as @NateEldredge in this post write that It seems to be pretty common for people starting out in academia to overestimate the risks of people stealing their work.  Personally, I'm rather at the other end of the spectrum, and I don't feel afraid that my ideas would be stolen.  Perhaps I'm naïve.
Is there any research on the question: how common is academic theft, really?  Such as surveys of people having experienced (or committed!) such theft according to an appropriate definition, possibly compared to peoples' perception as to the risks.  It would be interesting to see if there are some facts to refer to.  Perhaps it is field dependent?
(By academic theft, I am not talking about plagiarism, but rather about stealing research ideas before anything is published)

Its hard to quantify. Who will admit stealing ideas from the others? Yet Ive heard that from my supervisor, this mostly happens in the peer review process. He told me to be careful if reviewers using weird reason to reject my paper.

@Rein If surveys are strictly anonymous, people might admit.  And/or the survey might ask if they know of cases where others have stolen ideas.

I think you have to clarify the field. Stealing ideas might be easier in some lab sciences, for example.

possible duplicate of How much of my ongoing unpublished research should I disclose to others?

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1966/how-much-information-should-i-divulge-about-on-going-unpublished-research-at-a-c

@Paul: Not really. The question "how prevalent is theft?" is substantively different.

@RoboKaren: I think it's actually harder to "steal" an idea in the lab sciences—because you have to do the work associated with the purloined proposition, and beat the other person to submission.

Another link: My research work stolen and published as his own by the co-author without my consent

Stealing ideas us hard to impossible in the social sciences and humanities. So are there fields where it is easy?

@RoboKaren: You're kidding, right? Those fields have methodologies, research angles, linking items just as STEM fields do.

Unclear what you're asking (despite the typo in my comment).

@gerrit: Nowadays most academic surveys are conducted electronically.  I am computer savvy enough to be skeptical that such a survey would be "strictly anonymous" and not computer savvy enough to vet a given electronic survey system for anonymity.  Also, speaking for myself: if I stole someone's academic work, I would not admit it under any circumstance.  All in all, such a survey might be of some psychological/sociological interest, but it would not carry much weight in answering your question.

I'd say the easiest thing to get stolen is translation labor. I've helped on two projects where I was not being credited. I stopped one midway for that reason.

Is there any research on the question: how common is academic theft, really? Such as surveys of people having experienced (or committed!) such theft according to an appropriate definition, possibly compared to peoples perception as to the risks.

See the related articles:

De Vries, Raymond, Melissa S. Anderson, and Brian C. Martinson. "Normal misbehavior: Scientists talk about the ethics of research." Journal of empirical research on human research ethics: JERHRE 1.1 (2006): 43.

and

Martinson, Brian C., Melissa S. Anderson, and Raymond De Vries. "Scientists behaving badly." Nature 435.7043 (2005): 737-738.

Among a sample of 3,247 NIH-funded scientists in the United States, asked about the behavior "Using another's ideas without permission or giving due credit":

1.4% said they themselves have engaged in this behavior within the last three years
45.7% agreed with the statement, "I have observed or had other direct evidence of this behavior among my professional colleagues including postdoctoral associates, within the last three years."

Please read the article for methodology, limitations, etc.

Not quite an answer, but too long for a comment. In order to quantify how common academic theft is, one needs to define theft. You attempt to define it as:

By academic theft, I am not talking about plagiarism, but rather about stealing research ideas before anything is published

Now consider the following scenario. Alice has been carrying out research on topic X on and off for years. She has a number of nice research findings that she hasn't gotten around to publishing and hasn't shared the findings with anyone. Alice finally decides to start focusing on topic X and publish her existing results. Unbeknownst to Alice, Bob has just started working on topic X as she begin trying to publish her results. I don't think anyone would argue that Alice has engaged in academic theft. The issue becomes what would have to change for Alice to have engaged in academic theft.
What if Alice found out about Bob's intentions from Carol (or maybe Bob himself) and that changed Alice's research direction?
What if Alice only starts doing the research after she hears about what Bob is doing?
What if Bob presents a novel approach to topic X and Alice runs with the approach faster/further than Bob, but Alice is careful to always credit Bob with the new approach? What if Bob presented the new approach N years ago (choose your N)?
In order to quantify how often academic theft occurs, one needs to define what theft is.

Stealing ideas is difficult because you have a victim you have stolen from and presumably they know (or will know) that you stole from them.
Fraud is much more common, much easier to do, and much harder to prove—unless you do something really stupid like re-use the same image multiple times in various unrelated papers, something the people who get caught always seem to do. (Note 1)

Jan Hendrik Schön - Physics
Haruko Obokata - Biomedical sciences

Also common, as Yiuin states, is people (notably PIs and supervisors) taking the credit for their underlings'/minions' work.

Note 1: This means that the either all the frauds are stupid and re-use images and get caught, or that the frauds who don't re-use images are rarely caught.

It should be pointed out that some suspicions should have been raised in Schön's case. What experimental scientist can write a paper every eight days  (which was what Schön was doing the two years before he was caught!)?

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk#Controversies "Close scrutiny revealed that several of the photos of purportedly different cells were in fact photos of the same cell."

I've been a graduate student (Masters at one school and PhD at another) and I have never seen the sort of thing you are describing. I am afraid The Social Network has made everyone paranoid about their ideas being stolen. The reality is that most ideas are difficult to steal, because implementing them might be time-consuming enough that the original person has a huge head start. The only time you should worry is if you think you have a GREAT idea that you think is easy to do once you think of it. You will probably know if this is possible.
In reality though, there are a lot of smart people out there and if you are thinking of it, at least 1 other person has probably considered it. Its much more likely that you are recreating (or attempting something that doesn't work), but that might just be in my field (Neuroscience/Imaging).
On the other hand, I have found that it is pretty common for people to take credit for other peoples work, or use other peoples software without crediting, especially for grant applications. Again though, this might be unique to my field.

The question asked if there was any research on the topic.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
How to make group work work?
Occasionally I have some material to cover that is best presented in the form of take-home group projects.
Some student groups manage to find a way to coordinate their work well and to complete the projects successfully, with every team member benefiting from the collaboration. Other groups do not do so well:

Some groups evenly divide the work, but still work in isolation, losing the benefits of working with peers.
Some groups push the work to one or two students, while the remaining students merely contribute their name.

I wonder if there are strategies or tools instructors use that can encourage more groups to operate successfully while they are working outside of class?

I've run across a site called TEAMMATES that allows instructors to assign peer evaluations to students who are working on group projects. You may find it helpful:
http://teammatesv4.appspot.com/index.html

I think first it may be worthwhile to accept that in any group work situation there is the possibility that people will worked siloed (or isolated from one another) or one or two people will push the work forward while others are relegated or chose to remain in a passive state.
There are some good reasons for this. I recall being a student with a pretty solid GPA, group projects were a horror for me. If the project grade is based on the overall project and does not take into account individual contributions this meant that students who were less focused on their GPA would be willing to turn in something that was not up to my standards. This led both to situations where other students refused to do work on the project (knowing that the stronger students would carry them in order to avoid dings to their GPA) and to situations where stronger students would freeze out other students (ie the stronger students would choose to take all the work and not let other be involved) in order to maintain control over the project.
Group projects are often used as an analogy for working in the 'real world' where working in groups is the norm. The fundamental difference is that in most cases if a peer is completely slacking or sending in subpar work there is a concrete structure to monitor and handle that issue (which doesn't always work of course but there's almost always more accountability than in academic group projects). You can mimic this behavior in an academic setting by splitting up the grades for the project. Don't give one 'group grade' to everyone, instead have students report on who did what (this is particularly effective if you can have them set this early in the project instead of during turn-in) and correlate the students grade to both their work and their work in the context of the project. Having this set up early can be a great way of preventing aggressive or strong students from freezing out what are perceived as the 'weak links'.
Additionally consider regular checkpoints on the project. This will let you get a feel for the interactions in the group and the content being produced while also minimizing the opportunity for a student to jeopardize the group by waiting until the last minute to work on their part (this will still happen to some extent).
In short - add more structure to the group project. This increases the workload on your end but it mitigates the most common issues you'll see in groups during group projects.

And +1 for mentioning how group projects differ from the real world.

A similar strategy which I've seen work well is to scale each student's final grade based on peer assessment factors.  The actual function you use is up to you, but the basic idea is that if someone is identified by the rest of the team as not contributing, they fail.

+1 - first paragraph is me (too much compulsion about the final product wherin other students' contributions are never really up to par. I also agree with splitting the grade and scaling. Personally as a student I'm fine with doing most of the work if others don't want to contribute - I like knowing when things will get done and how well they get done; but in the end, I want to be recognized for my extra effort in the event that others did not contribute to the overall project. Individual evaluations from each student about others' contributions and grade-scaling are a good combo imo.

One caveat is that you want to avoid having a group of strong students filled out to size with an average student. You risk that one student finding himself out of his league and receiving bad peer grades for average work. I've seen this go horribly wrong when a fellow student failed a class just because he wasn't putting in as many hours as the rest of his team who were putting in triple the hours of the other groups.

Splitting the grade is a very good way to encourage the participation of every one. However, it means you know how to split the grade. You can ask for each work to have an author contribution section, stating both who did work on which part and the overall participation of each student. You can also ask the group to tell you how to split the grade. It will encourage them to discuss the contribution of each one together. Most of time if they work fair together they will just split equally, but it will encourage to give less if one did slack which is just fair. Also for longer project (like semester long) I would have Q&A session with a teacher or teaching assistant. Clearly state the fair/unfair  work repartition is one of the subject that can be discussed in this occasion. I would definitely not recommend to do the spilt yourself if not equally. There will always be this guy who can talk more than speak that will trick you. If this guy tries to trick the other group member, then they need to learn how to deal with it. it's part of their training. Also some time they will decide to split and work separately, it is sometime the best way to get the thing done and they need to recognise those situation too. Example: they work with people they don't like and interact very badly.
I think letting the student assign their own group roles themselves is critically important for their training. You want them to be able to take decision as a group, as they might need to do when they will be working in a company. They will be natural leaders that will take the reins, but that is ok, not everyone is good in this position. They might enter confrontation, but this is something they will also face later in their career and they need to be prepared for that.

That is a great idea. While the dishonest students will still continue as always, it will likely lead to better results among the honest ones.

Face-to-face marking is a good way to assess relative understanding as well as contribution.  I used to do this for lab work, and in the vast majority of cases the difference was at most a few % restrict to things like their ability to keep decent lab books.  Occasionally we had a slacker and a relatively hard worker.  When one of the pair got double the mark of the other it normally got the message across.  Get them to present the work, perhaps to the whole class.  No need for powerpoint, just have them stand in front of a whiteboard.  Bonus skills training as well.

Drop the flat hierarchy in group projects. Use and quality based hierarchy, assign the hard-working students as group leads. Not all of them have the same level of leading qualities, but ask from them not to take the whole responsibility.
Divide the project into tasks, and tasks into subtasks (if they don't know how to do it internally, but first give them time to try to do it, or ask for that explicitly). Otherwise, clearly assign subtasks to each group member and require each group member to spend certain amount of time per week on those tasks. Lets say each student has to spend 10 hours per week on the project related tasks. Ask  students to keep track of the time they spend on a spreadsheet document by marking down the start-end times and describing the solution, or if there is no solution why it didn't work. Require them to provide also references. This document preparation should not last longer than 15 - 30 min per week. Allow the document to be informal.
Make sure to protect your hard-working students. As @Nahkki has mentioned, group project are nightmare for good students, as they take all the workload and do everything just to ensure that the overall grade remains within their standards. However, such behaviour has long-term effects on the hard-working students, resulting in burnout. Protect them as they may show up being useful in the later stages of the project, or sometimes in the future.

'assign the hard-working students as group leads' really? You are suggesting to put all the responsibility on someone you subjectively assess as hard-working? 'Protect them as they may show up being useful in the later stages' useful for what?

why you assume the assessment is subjective? If you know the student from previous classes you can do the assignment during the initial meetings. Otherwise delay such an assignment to a later point in time. If the project is part of an ongoing course you already should have some idea about who is what. If the project starts "today" require transcript/previous experience ;) 2) Yeah, if the project is part of a bigger project associated to the research group, you would ideally want to employ one of the guys as student worker in the same project later on. That was my exact experience

'you already should have some idea about who is what' I generally refrain myself from speculating on future student achievements, some just have a high variability and people change or have sudden imperatives, etc. Making a student your golden boy/girl is not going to be helpful to anyone, IMHO.

whatever you say might be correct for your own context, and not necessarily for mine. so yeah maybe, experiences differ. no point in dragging the discussion ;)

How does the instructor use the hours work log data? Or what do they do with that data? I think the students who do not contribute to the projects will likewise have no problem assembling a fake log.

Does subtasks create more isolation within the groups or do you have a method in your subtask creation that prevents this?

I really can't see this working out well. Those best/hardest working students are going to take on more of the load - they'll get a little more out of it in exchange, while the others will lose out completely.  It's by no means uncommon for a near-genius to be rubbish at working in a group let alone leading one, and for a straight-B student to be highly adept at drawing all the threads together. The essence of group-work is learning to deal with this.  Would have been my first downvote here, but the 3rd para makes some good points that IMO are at odds with your idea in the 1st.

I took a class that involved group work.  The professor allowed groups to vote to fire a member, provided they gave sufficient reason to the professor.  This meant that everyone was held responsible.
My group nearly fired someone who kept missing meetings and then lied about it.  However, he was sufficiently scared into working hard, so we let it slide.
I'm not saying this allowing teams to "fire" people is the best way.  However, I think that finding a way to make team members accountable to each other is essential.

I have some groups with 3 students pressuring 1 or 2 students to do the work for them. Would firing still help in that situation?

@Village:  An important aspect to stress with my professor's system: you must give a sufficient reason to the professor as to why you are firing the individual.  In your situation some sort of peer review at the end would be the best solution.  The professor had that as well, and grades were adjusted accordingly.

Ken Heller, who promotes a group-based approach for physics, uses a neat strategy to discourage slacking.
Exams are divided into an individual part and subsequently a group part, but if a member ever failed (even once) to attend the group sessions the rest of his or her group votes to allow or not allow that person to participate in the group portion of the exam.

I had an engineering teacher in high school who by far was the best (in my high school) at assigning group projects.
Students have a tendency to want to work alone because that is the environment they are accustomed to. High school teaches kids how to work in a 20th century factory: stay in line, follow the rules, do your work and let other people do their work.
My engineering teacher wanted us to work as adults would: he assigned us brief guidelines, and our group was responsible for collaborating and producing something for him. For example, as the first project in the intro to engineering class, he started by showing us a lamp he made. Then he asked us how one could make 10,000 of them for as low cost and as easily as possible. We had to deliver an assembly process (to make the lamp), a parts lists, and a floor plan of the building we would theoretically have.
I think what mostly made it so good was the lack of formatting. Many kids didn't like it, you had to actually listen when he talked because he didn't hand out sheets reiterating what he just said. You had to use your best judgement with regards to making the product look as nice as possible, as apposed to following some guidelines. The class made you think, you couldn't just go from one step to the next and get the correct answer, you had to think for yourself and make up your own steps.
Grading was a struggle for him, especially because this was one of his first times teaching this class. You got a grade for the project (everyone in the group got the same grade), and you got a grades for small check ins to make sure you were actually doing stuff in your group.
Engineering is mostly about problem solving, so when asked questions he would often respond "That's your problem". He did so if people complained they were doing too much of the work, or if their group wasn't listening to them, etc. You can't learn how to work in a group if some higher power solves your communication problems for you.
Hope that helps, sorry for rambling.

It was a great anecdote but I downvoted because it does not address the issue of how to help students divide the work, which is the main concern.

I'm sorry I thought I addressed that: leaving them to manage themselves can be a good solution. Some things, like group communication, are best learned by experience. Telling them to sort out their own problems forces them to learn how to do so.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Is it acceptable to heavily reference blogs, forums, and other informal media?
I am pursuing a specific research question. I have thoroughly surveyed existing research on the topic, and found dozens of researchers working on the problem, but was disappointed by their work. Their research:

Does not consider the full magnitude of the problem.
Constantly tests old, insufficient methods.
Overlooks significant details, so the test results are meaningless.
Lacks innovation.

I found lots of interesting ideas posted around the Internet. In blogs, forums, and USENET, I found people with some clever new ideas to approach the problem. These people had a genuine stake in the problem, so I found their ideas actually brought the problem somewhere meaningful. These informally-posted ideas need testing and considerable refinement. They are far from perfect, but many times better than what the academics are dealing with.
I would like to prepare some trials and publish some papers, centered around a number of these ideas. It is only fair that I give credit to the authors of those ideas. Essentially, I need to give credit to lots of anonymous people who posted their ideas informally.  I have never read an academic paper containing highly informal references. Can I include references like this in my paper?
MutantTurtle17. “My Amazing DIY Tin-can Refugee Shelter.” MyBlog. 2014.
    Retrieved from http://...

SimCityFan2012. “RE: RE: Look at this!” Shelter Designs Forum. 2013.
    Retrieved from http://...

Is your question whether you should cite ideas from these sources or whether you should use them? Because certainly if you use them, you are required to cite them.

@ff524 How is your definition of "use"? If Village reads about a cool new approach to tackle a problem in a blog, it will influence how (s)he approaches the problem next, even if (s)he does not use the exact same approach. However, one can hardly cite everything one has ever read about a topic.

@xLeitix  I mean "use in a way that typically requires citation," which does not depend on the kind of source it is (academic, informal, whatever)

One option that I have used before, is adding a footnote saying something along the lines of "Inspired by ideas discussed on thisblog.com"

@ff524 But it does. You should not excessively "use" soft sources in a way that requires citation. If you do, you can easily run into the trouble that says that your entire research is based on shaky assumptions.

@xLeitix I mean that the threshold for when citation is required doesn't depend on the source; I'm not commenting on when you should use the source

You might find some responses to a semi-similar question I asked to be useful. It's not exactly the same, but might help a little.

Does your paper really test & verify lots of ideas?
You state that "I would like to prepare some trials and publish some papers, centered around a number of these ideas."  How many of those ideas do you expect to actually implement per a single paper?
If you implement, evaluate and contrast three novel ideas from blogs&forums, preferably including a solid comparison against a baseline published method; then that's just three informal items that you need to cite, in addition to the current academic publications.
There are references and references
If your paper assumes something, or claims non-obvious things, then you need 'proof' of it outside of your paper that should come from references. Those references need to be trustworthy - preferably respectable peer reviewed publications.
However, if your paper uses references for giving credit to ideas or pointing to original sources, then that's an entirely different class of reference, where blogs and forums are just as acceptable as, say, referencing archives of private informal letters that are used in studies of literature or history.
If you have never read an academic paper with a lot of informal references, then it is because it is very dependent on the field you're studying - for example, a thesis about racial stereotypes in online media would reference many informal sources as examples; while a thesis about particle physics wouldn't have any.

Why not then just split your references under two headers: References and Sources

This is an actual problem that I also struggle with in some aspects of my research. There are problems in which the blogging and industrial world is, sadly, miles ahead of the scientific state of the art. However, citing an abundance of blogs and other non-reviewed resources is rarely a good idea. A few citations of web resources are usually ok, though. Hence, my (imperfect) solution to the problem currently is to cite the 2, 3 web resources that are best suited for my paper, and try to find academic resources that cover the rest of the ground as good as possible.
That being said, this situation is certainly a possibility for you. If you can take the ideas from these forums and blogs, and bring them on a sound scientific basis (e.g., through user studies or formal analysis, whatever is appropriate for your research) and publish it both scientifically and informally (e.g., in your own blog), there is a good chance that you make a strong impact on both the scientific side and the blogging community. At the end of the day, people tend to remember not only who originally threw a revolutionary idea or concept out there, but also (sometimes even more so) the person that made the revolutionary idea work (or, at least, clearly showed that it works).

Another point is that anything that is not peer reviewed cannot be considered "true", and thus, cannot be used to back up claims (except some very obvious and objective cases). On the other hand, how good is the place where you got your idea, if you did your job well, doesn't matter.

@Davidmh: I've repeatedly run into such situations, and the claim I was trying to back up was invariably something along the lines of "technique X is used in real-world applications of domain Y". For lack of any peer-reviewed surveys on all kinds of new product versions and their single features, citing the software package itself (or its official website) is often the only choice. At the same time, the statement that feature X exists in real-world software is proven to be "true" by the very existence of said software, despite not being peer-reviewed.

@O.R.Mapper that follows in the category of "obvious and objective". In any case, the fact that other people are using it is not relevant for the validity of the research (but it is always good to show that your work has down to earth applications).

@Davidmh: Maybe I am in a field that is rather close to real-world applications, but I have made the experience that showing that certain related work is used in real life rather than just defined in papers can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection of a paper. I think that is because of the very true statement that xLeitix made, "There are problems in which the blogging and industrial world is, sadly, miles ahead of the scientific state of the art.", so comparing new contributions only to other research is deemed insufficient by the respective reviewers.

It is absurd to assert that anything that is not peer reviewed cannot be considered true (or "true").  There are many many factual assertions you could make in research where the relevant reference confirming the assertion is a non-peer reviewed source (e.g., newspaper reports, legislation, court judgments, etc.).

Maybe one way of dealing with having lots of informal references would be to divide the bibliography into sections, so that the reader can easily see the different types of reference (acknowledgement versus justification).
Or alternatively maybe put them all in an extended acknowledgements section (since databases won't be able to do much with blog citations anyway, perhaps it wouldn't matter so much if they don't appear in the official bibliography, provided the reader is sufficiently informed of who came up with what).

An acknowledgment isn't the same thing as a citation so that doesn't seem to be a good solution.

I guess it depends on how you phrase it in your text. If you are saying "x is true because Y said so" then you are claiming that Y is a reliable source who would or should know if x is true or not. If you say "x could be true (source: Y) but let's test it to see" those are very different things.

It may be I've slightly misunderstood the question. I read it not as 'these people have essentially published research in an informal setting' (in which case I'd see this as a citation), but rather as 'these people have generated ideas for research that could be done/suggestions for possible solutions to a problem, but haven't done the actual research of testing them' (in which case I'd see this as acknowledging their ideas, whether as a formal citation or by stating this more explicitly).

I am a mathematician, former editor of several journals (currently, just one). Suppose I were to receive a paper submission with an accompanying email saying something along the lines:

I have thoroughly surveyed existing research on the topic, and found dozens of researchers working on the problem, but was disappointed by their work. Their research:

Does not consider the full magnitude of the problem.
Constantly tests old, insufficient methods.
Overlooks significant details, so the test results are meaningless.
Lacks innovation.

I found lots of interesting ideas posted around the Internet. In blogs, forums, and USENET, I found people with some clever new ideas to approach the problem. These people had a genuine stake in the problem, so I found their ideas actually brought the problem somewhere meaningful. These informally-posted ideas need testing and considerable refinement. They are far from perfect, but many times better than what the academics are dealing with.

Or/and, checking the bibliography list, I see many references to Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, blogs by people I never heard of...
My crank-meter would go to something like 99% and my first reaction would be:
Should I even bother soliciting a quick opinion (let alone a referee report) on this paper? Or should I check if the supposed solution of the 4-dimensional smooth Poincare Conjecture uses "simply-connected" instead of "homotopy-equivalent to the 4-sphere?"

For many journals you don't need to submit a cover letter along the manuscript. Moreover the above can be said more subtly.

@MassimoOrtolano: True, that's why I put a connector "or/and". Yes, it can be put more subtly...

If the post knowingly belongs to some well known researcher or otherwise a known, notable person, such post can be cited, because even "personal communication" at the end can be a reference. However it is not good as a proof that something questionable is true as this is not a peer reviewed article.
If the author of the post is anonymous or not a scientist, such source is not trustworthy and is only suitable as a raw input data for analysis in social research.


text:
Should a formal academic grievance list what an action the student hopes will occur?
I have a problem with a course, but my informal communications with the instructor and chair led nowhere.
My student handbook shows a policy for filing a formal grievance, which seems more like a legal process for solving problems. I must mail a letter to my instructor and wait for a reply from them.
In the letter, I will explain my complaint regarding the course. Should a formal grievance letter also list which actions I hope they will take to resolve the problem? Such as, "My grade should be raised." or "Let me retake the course without record of the first time." or "Tuition refund."

Who are you sending this to? Could they do what you ask for, if they wanted?

First I will send it to the instructor, with some copies sent to others. The instructor must make a decision within a certain time frame. If I am not satisfied, I can go to the chair. I do not know who in the school has what ability to do what. Can instructors grant tuition refunds? None of the school's policies are very detailed.

What are you hoping to accomplish with a formal complaint? Prove that you are right? Get a higher grade? Get a refund? Because, I highly doubt that you will accomplish these goals with a formal complaint.

A refund seems fair to me. Why do you think that is doubtful? Many businesses offer refunds when services are not rendered. Why is a school any different?

@Village "Get a refund" based on "My grade should be raised" is very unlikely to happen, because this sets a bad precedent. On the other hand "Please, let me retake the course" sounds reasonable

Also this "Many businesses offer refunds when services are not rendered" might be true but not based on the word of one person. If 100 people were enrolled in this course and you are the only one posting a formal complaint, that might reflect bad on you. You might be right (for all I know) but formal complaints are for very serious reasons (e.g. professor harassment) and not for not good enough teachers or too difficult courses.

@Alexandros: in the US at least, students with a valid grievance often do get a positive outcome such as a grade change from a formal complaint. It does depend on the kind of complaint and its validity

"Many businesses offer refunds when services are not rendered." -- As perverted the US system is, note that the service offered is to provide teaching, nothing more. Actual learning is your responsibility. Any formal complaint must regard a formal mishap, such as provably unfair (= different from other students) treatment or formal/technical mistakes in the exam (grading). "I should have passed" is not a reasonable claim to make (as the examiner attests the opposite).

The reason that the grievance process sounds like "a legal process for solving problems" is that it is indeed a pseudo-legal process for solving problems. In particular, it is used when the instructor has done something that violates university policy - unfair grading is a frequent complaint.
These grievances typically follow a detailed policy to try to ensure that student complaints are treated fairly. The first step is often to formally notify the instructor in writing, and that seems to be the purpose of the letter.
In the letter, you should lay out the facts as you see them, and you should include the resolution you would like to see. Try to write the letter in a businesslike way - you want to advocate for yourself, but keep to the facts and try not to say things that you cannot justify later.
If the instructor and department chair cannot or do not resolve the issue, it will move up to the next level, which is typically review by a dean. If the dean cannot resolve it, it goes to the next level, which may involve a hearing of some sort.  In my experience many complaints are resolved by the department chair or dean, particularly when the situation is clear cut (e.g. a professor didn't follow the grading policy from the course syllabus).
I cannot say what remedies will be available at your school - this will vary by school. There are certainly colleges where the higher-level administration could allow you to take the course again, or drop the first course from your transcript. The instructor will not be able to do those things, but you have to work through the process one layer at a time in any case.


text:
Supervisor gave my PhD project to another student
I am a PhD student in life sciences. My PhD project's goal is to analyze specific data and to check a totally new idea in the field I am working in. This project is risky, however, very promising. With my supervisor, we planned all the studies and experiments before the start of the PhD, and he did promise that this would be my project. However, just as I started the PhD, he asked me to finish other experiments as I am the only one in the department who knows methodology and that work was crucial for the lab funding.
At the same time, he gave my project to another student claiming that he wants to know results and to publish this as early as possible. This student started the experiments and to analyze data. Moreover, my supervisor presented him to our collaborator (well known and influential scientist in the field) as the main researcher.
At this point I am desperate. Yes, I am jealous, but just don't know what to do in this situation. I came to this lab only for this project. I tried to mention this to my supervisor, but he just said: "Well, these findings are very important to us and I want to know the results as soon as possible".
It's only 4 months into experiments and I hope that someone could suggest how can I change this situation.

Have you spoken to anyone else about this? eg, department head, graduate programme head etc.? When you say you are 4 months into experiments, do you mean you started your PhD 4 months ago?

Was it ever actually your project? Or was it the professor's and he just assigned it to you but before you ever started on it he gave it to someone else?

Have you discussed with your supervisor what he sees as being your main PhD project?

@PatriciaShanahan, yes, I did. Before the PhD we talked and planned how it all should go. And as I said, he did promise me that this will be my project, thus I started my PhD at his lab.

@AustinHenley, main idea, experiments were formed by both of us. It's not only his idea. And then he gave my other experiments to finish while giving my project to another person.

@user54101 I meant, have you repeated that discussion after the change in plan? Given your comment, you should also discuss co-authorship for any papers that depend on your ideas.

You "planned all studies and experiments" and "[another] student started experiments and to analyze data," it is unclear whether your planning is sufficient for co-authorship, but you certainly have the basis for it and you should consider whether to ask for co-authorship. Moving forwards, you could collaborate on the project with the other student.

You know for the most part supervisors are smart enough to handle their students and their research groups. However, once in a while, there will be a problem either with the student and/or supervisor. So two things here:
Know You Rights and Hierarchies: Simply know what your rights are in your institute. Moreover, know the hierarchies. For example, who is the boss of your supervisor, or even, who is the boss of the boss of your supervisor? You know where I'm going with this? This bring me to the second point.
Be Vocal and Express Yourself at the Meetings: If you sit at your desk and pretend everything is fine, and your supervisor manipulates the situation (assuming you are telling the truth here), then YOU are the one responsible, because you didn't speak your mind. Have a meeting with the head of the group (your supervisor's boss) and speak about it. Tell him/her your story and situation and he/she should sort this out. If you couldn't sort it out, have a meeting with someone higher. They are there to help you.

"If you sit at your desk and pretend everything is fine, and your supervisor manipulates the situation (assuming you are telling the truth here), then YOU are the one responsible, because you didn't speak your mind" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming

If this was really the way you were treated - by which I mean that you have to be sure not to misinterpret statements or promises of your supervisor - then you should run.
A PhD requires trust between the supervisor and the student. After such a breach of trust, you need to find a new supervisor.


text:
How do "scientific couples" (from different fields) find positions?
When two people in a couple are both in science, but specialised in different fields, how can they both find relevant positions but still be geographically reasonably proximate?
Compromise and change fields? Work part-time from a distance if employers' permit it (do they usually?)? Travel both quite far each day? One person leaves science?
Are there other ways to resolve this? Any personal experiences around here?

This is a fairly big topic; doing a search through Science (the journal) reveals many articles on this topic. Rather than link to them individually, I suggest you read through the different articles and learn what you can.

This is commonly known as the "two-body problem".

Many universities (like the one where my wife and I work) have dual-career hiring programs explicitly to address this issue.  It's definitely worth asking—carefully—whether the universities you are considering have such a program.
Here's how our system works.  Suppose Department X offers a faculty position to Partner A, and later department Y offers a faculty position to Partner B.  Then Partner B's salary is paid 1/3 by department Y, 1/3 by department X, and 1/3 from a general campus fund.*  (Note that X and Y may be the same department.)
So Department Y has a significant financial incentive to hire Partner B.  On the other hand, Department X must be willing to pay extra for Partner A; in practice, however, once an faculty offer to A is actually on the table, most department chairs find it hard to refuse to help hire B.
This is why you have to be careful how and when you ask.  It's illegal in the US to discriminate against a job candidate because they're married—we're not even allowed to ask—but it is completely legal to hire a cheaper candidate over a more expensive one.  If department X already knows that you have a two-body problem, they also know that hiring you will be more expensive.  The safest strategy is not to mention that your partner needs a position (or even that your partner is another academic) until an offer is on the table.

*When I originally posted this answer in 2012, this financial arrangement was de-facto permanent, but my university has recently refined its policies.  As of June 2018, the joint funding arrangement is permanent (“recurring”) if Partner B has a tenure-track faculty position, and limited to three years otherwise.

Do you know if this practice is common outside of the US? This sounds like the sort of practice which could fall foul of employment regulations is the UK (and possibly the rest of Europe).

How long is X required to pay part of B's salary?  If it's indefinite I'd be concerned that it would make A more vulnerable to being laid off or given smaller than normal pay raises as a cost containment measure.

@Mark, the idea of the "double body" accommodation was scolded upon by an ANZ university where both my wife and I interviewed. While lower tier US universities would have seen this as advantageous to hire Ph.D.s from good places, the ANZ university in question viewed this as a preferential treatment, and stepped out of communicating with us. So yes, probably in the UK academic context (which ANZ has inherited), this would not work well.

@StasK What's ANZ?  Australia / New Zealand?

@gerrit, yes; sorry, I thought it was a common enough abbreviation.

This is a very difficult, and unfortunately common problem. It is dealt with in many ways, including all of the ones you mention. Solving the problem almost always involves a serious compromise by one or both parties. Couples can take many approaches:

Not compromise on their jobs: both take the best academic jobs they can find. This usually involves living apart, in different cities, sometimes for years. They end up with lots of frequent flyer miles.
One becomes an academic, the other leaves academia: this makes it much easier to live together, but might require a major sacrifice by one of the couple, if they had their heart set on an academic career.
Both compromise on placement quality: couples can commit to both finding academic jobs together. Since it is difficult to find two jobs at the same university, this often involves taking jobs at a lower ranked institution, or less desirable location than either could get on their own. Some universities specialize in recruiting couples: this can be a coup for the university, since they get two researchers who are both higher quality than they would normally be able to recruit.

A long (daily) commute for each person can represent an extremely successful outcome of type 1), or a less successful outcome of type 3). For example, it is possible (although grueling) for a couple to live in Princeton, and have one commute to Philadelphia and one commute to New York.
This is not to say that it is impossible to achieve perfect success: there are academic couples, both of whom are in the same department at the top university in their field. But this requires an extraordinary amount of both talent and luck.

Real-life example: one partner is in Norway, another partner - in the Netherlands...

I have not performed a literature survey, but the only solution that looks viable is to choose a large and well-connected city like London with plenty of scope for both fields.
It is very common in India to find faculty couples, especially in the IITs. It is advantageous for the university as they are, in a way, settling the couple and ensuring their long-term stay.

I wish I could just choose a large and well-connected city like London, partner or no partner. But, since I'm not a rock-star researcher, I probably have a higher chance of finding an industry job in London than I do finding a faculty one. It might be viable (from vie - life; it has a potential to last if established), but it certainly doesn't sound very feasible (from faire, fais- - to do, to make; doesn't seem doable) or achievable in the first place. "Only job solution for academic couples are capitals (big cities) like London" sounds like a polite way to dissuade one from the idea.


text:
If tenured staff are virtually unsackable, why is the drive to find funding so strong?
Tenured staff are virtually impossible to fire, why is the urge to find funding so strong? For post-docs and other untentured scientific staff I can understand, for their job depends on it. For a tenured professor it would rather be the joy and honour of doing important research. Apart from a reduction in joy and honour, are there any consequences if a tenured professor fails to get grants?

Bigger teaching loads. Wasted life and ambition.

In many departments, tenured professors can use bringing in external funds to the department as a means of "buying" their way out of some of their teaching and administrative commitments. Similarly, other departments might use additional committee assignments and teaching loads to "punish" people who don't bring in grants. They may also have less flexibility in selecting teaching assignments.
In other countries, such as Germany, a long-term shortage in funding can lead to the consequence of a chair not being "succeeded" when the holder retires; in that case, the institute (equivalent to a US group) the professor is in charge of is wound down rather than finding a new leader for the group.

This seems to me a rather overly cynical viewpoint. I definitely agree with JeffE that most do it because they enjoy doing research, and doing research costs money.

@eykanal I've seen both cases in action. To add to aeismail's notes many departments make raises above the bare minimum COLA dependent on some kind of merit formula and/or voting by the rest of the department. Departments that use voting can get rid of an unloved but tenured colleague by denying him or her raises until they leave in frustration. In departments that use formulas you can give your detractors the finger by keeping the grants/awards/papers/books coming (I know a guy who's devoted the last 15 years to this approach). The smaller the #$%*heap the worse the politics.

Most tenured faculty enjoy research (else why would they take a job that requires it?) and most research costs money.  In particular: Faculty who benefit from working with students (or postdocs, or staff) need money to pay them, and faculty whose research depends on specialized equipment or travel need money to pay for it.
This is the carrot; @aeismail is describing the stick.  I imagine both motivations can be found at every institution.

In addition, many tenured staff are highly skilled academics, who have worked for years to be able to win highly competitive grant awards for significant amounts of cash.

Tenure implies you're difficult to fire. It doesn't say anything about needing to pay you. @JeffE described @aeismail's answer as the stick, but there's a bigger one. Especially in soft money positions, a significant portion of your salary, much of the funding for your lab, etc. all come from grant funding. While they might not fire a tenured professor who isn't "pulling their weight" with grant funding, they may find themselves losing lab space to better funded or new faculty, not having the resources to maintain a functional research group, etc.
As long as you're comfortable with you, your office, and whatever salary is hard money being the entirety of your research group, you don't need to ever find funding. But if you want more than that, the money has to come from somewhere.

Hmm. I totally forgot about the 9- versus 12-month salary issue.

@aeismail Beyond that, my institution has some very heavily soft money positions.


text:
How (un)usual is changing fields?
For a long time I thought that when I start my PhD, my field of research is fixed for the rest of my academic career. However, I've encountered multiple people who have a PhD in space science or particle physics, and have later moved to atmospheric science or remote sensing — one of them even after already having tenure, starting an entirely new topic while remaining at the same institute. How common or uncommon is it to change to an unrelated field within natural science? How much chance would one have of a post-doc if the newly graduated PhD has no experience with the actual topic whatsoever? Is it expected that a Postdoc spends the first 3–6 months getting into the field, or that he/she can dive into the depth right away? Of course, a lot of scientifically relevant skills (data analysis, critical thinking, programming, statistics, etc.) are in common between different fields, but how important is the content of ones experience, really?
Related but different question: How might changing topic affect a career in academia? (different because from e.g. particle physics to climate science is more than just changing topic)

I expect your biggest challenge will be that you'll been competing again others who have focused longer on that field, better prepared, better insights. If the competition is weak, so much the better for you. As far as a career in academia, same issue. On the other hand, occasionally cross-over fields pop up, perfect opportunities for those with feet in two areas. C'est la vie.

Most successful career researchers choose their field fairly early on in their career. This is often due to their approach to research; they have a fundamental question they're attempting to answer, and they spend years attacking different parts of the question through various projects. Pursuing research in this manner allows for flexibility in the research and can lead to some very interesting breakthroughs.
From what I've seen, those who do change areas of interest often do so within a single field, so that the majority of their expertise is still relevant. Yes, data analysis skills can transfer, but much of a researcher's expertise is in the form of a deep understanding of what the past and current state of the field; knowing important (and less important) papers, what different lab groups are researching, what's been tried and what hasn't. Since such a knowledge base can take many years to gain, people are often reluctant to switch.
I would venture that it's more common for a field to shift than for a single researcher to shift; i.e., some new technology or methodology allows a whole group of researchers in a given field to investigate something new or different.

I think that a lot of this depends on what you define by "change fields".
In my observation, there is generally a lot of commonality even in a change, when the change is successful.
For example, somebody might have a mathematical toolkit of skills that they are very good at, and discover that it is useful in an application area that they didn't originate in.  As they work in that application area, it exposes them to new problems that they find they need to solve to make progress, which leads to developing new skills and interests.  From those one might move again, and so on.
The researchers whose work I respect most have often been through several of these types of transitions over the course of their careers.  There are always uniting themes, but the topics, techniques, and intersecting communities may well change over time.

As someone who has changed fields completely, I wanted to chip in. In my experience, changing between fields (rather than within) is extremely uncommon. I have only met one other person in the last 10 years who has also done so; this is all in Europe, mind you.
The entire system of getting a PhD is about (aside from becoming a researcher) gaining very specific knowledge in a specific area- after having gained all this skill and knowledge, it is very costly to then leave the field to something that does not build on those skills nor the knowledge.
My advice would thus be to focus on transferable skills (such as the ones you mentioned) if you know that you want to switch. I knew before I started my PhD that I would never end up in the field- thus, I focused heavily on those and less so on expanding topic-wise. When applying for my post-docs, knowledge wasn't even considered- it was all about my technical skills. It all depends on the post-doc and the field, of course. As a personal note, while I don't regret switching, it was (and still is) a lot of work making up for essentially missing education in the area you work in.