That’s it, that’s the joke.
Guy thinks being the CEO of a company that does research is the same thing as doing the research itself. He is not even the last corresponding author (that is where PIs in natural sciences almost always put their names), he had to put him self as both the first author and the corresponding author. It must suck to work for him.
Well that is a nice illustration for the fact that listing an h index with no context doesn’t mean much.
I recall being a grad student, and one of my friends was super happy their paper was mentioned. The context was basically “Contrary to claims by [friend et al]…”
But you HAVE heard of them!
Depending on the context (was the whole paper built on wrong assumptions or was there just some small error) that can still be a good thing?
the number seems too lowEvery one of those citations is an abuse of the system
Unfortunately these citations don’t come with a fine.
Why would that be? He’s probably just the last author of a bunch of valid articles published by his employees. He probably did not take part in the ideation or writing of those articles, but that is quite common in academia as well.
If he didn’t have anything to do with the paper, he shouldn’t be on the paper
He paid for the research. While I do agree, this is very common in academia. The PI will most often be last author even if he didn’t read the paper.
The PI should definitely be on the paper. But the president of the company should not. He’s not the PI. At the lab where I work, if you didn’t participate in the research, you don’t go on the paper. I don’t throw Donald Trump on there, why should they put Elon on there? There’s a lot of people paying for research who aren’t listed as authors. I’ve literally never put a funder as an author. I’ve mentioned it at the end in an acknowledgement section, but not authorship.
PIs often have no idea what people in their group are actually working on. They may at times just give a general direction of what research should be about. It is common for people doing research for a company to list the CTO or whatever relevant figure as author. The fact that you do not do it reveals nothing regarding the fact that this is quite common practice.
I guess I’ve never been in an organization like that. Every Pi I’ve ever worked with knew at least the high level of what people were working on. Thanks for the insight.





