Thought I'd bring awareness to this shady trend among med students. Basically med students writing a crap ton of review articles and letter to the editors. We all know that letters to the editors require little to no work. Someone can write 20 of these in a month and say "I have 20+ publications" which an overworked PD may not recognize. I actually saw one med student with 50+ review articles and 17 letters to the editors (with the rest of the papers filled by low quality case studies/case series) making him close to 100 papers. Now he goes on podcasts talking about how prolific he is and shattering med student records. Additionally, I've seen other students who write a response to a letter to the editor (that was originally to their paper) and then deposit that response into pubmed themselves.
It's no wonder why people make a joke out of the neurosurgery literature. I can't think of any other field that has such low quality literature as neurosurgery (even ortho isn't this bad). Seems like the main culprit journal who accepts this garbage research is World Neurosurgery. I'm assuming that they know that review articles tend to get many citations and consequently, will raise the impact factor of their journal. JNS seems to have a higher threshold and still accepts the best neurosurgery research.
The solution to this problem would be to only count original research. PDs should stop encouraging this behavior as well and the journals should be held accountable.
It's no wonder why people make a joke out of the neurosurgery literature. I can't think of any other field that has such low quality literature as neurosurgery (even ortho isn't this bad). Seems like the main culprit journal who accepts this garbage research is World Neurosurgery. I'm assuming that they know that review articles tend to get many citations and consequently, will raise the impact factor of their journal. JNS seems to have a higher threshold and still accepts the best neurosurgery research.
The solution to this problem would be to only count original research. PDs should stop encouraging this behavior as well and the journals should be held accountable.
