RAFAEL Luque, a 44-year-old chemistry professor, had 58 publications just this year, or the equivalent of one article every 37 hours. He published 110 journal articles last year, and at least 700 journal articles in his academic career in his field of green chemistry, which is concerned with synthesizing products with very minimal waste.

He is so prolific that universities are willing to give him part-time appointments just for them to take credit for all his publications and citations to amplify their metrics and rankings. He has become a prime commodity in a world where universities are ranked using a system of scoring where publications and citations are given prominent weight. It seems that this has become a practice in many universities. For example, the journal Science once reported that the King Abdulaziz University offered highly cited academic researchers an attractive annual salary of $76,000 in exchange for spending just one week in a year on its campus, with the condition that the researchers would cite the university as their second affiliation. In this way, the university could get credit for the researcher's publications.