Mark Griffiths: the professor who publishes a paper every two days

With a peer-reviewed journal paper published every two days this year, Mark Griffiths is not a researcher whose scholarly output has been slowed by the coronavirus crisis.

The UK’s most prolific psychologist, who is distinguished professor of behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University, has published 161 times so far in 2020, according to the Scopus database, which records papers, books, conference proceedings and letters – taking his career publication tally to 864.

That impressive figure may understate his true output: Google Scholar attributes at least 1,200 publications to his name, which have helped him gain some 80,000 citations, including 50,000 in the past five years alone.

So how does Professor Griffiths produce this staggering number of papers when many social psychologists are pleased to publish one or two articles a year? Having a large stable of research collaborators was one of the main reasons, he told Times Higher Education Scopus puts his total number of co-authors at 898.

“The vast majority of my co-authors come from my PhD students – I have eight to 10 PhD students at any one time and some [former students] have since become highly prolific publishers,” he explained.

Professor Griffiths, who is director of NTU’s International Gaming Research Unit, insisted that he had “made an intellectual contribution to every refereed paper I’ve published” and was often involved in the design of research projects, oversight and the critical review of manuscripts.

The issue of professors gaining authorship credit for critically reviewing manuscripts can be controversial, even if it is accepted by publishers and is officially recognised by the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) system. For Professor Griffiths, his input is significant. “I can spend five or six hours on the first draft of a paper and some papers go through up to 10 redrafts,” he said.

“Every single day someone sends me a paper saying ‘I’d love to have your name on this’, but I tell them no – unless I’ve made an intellectual contribution, I will not have my name on a paper,” he said.

However, given the immense work involved in this reviewing role alone, how is it possible to publish so much? “The answer is that I have never worked a 37-hour week – typically I work 50 to 60 hours a week,” Professor Griffiths said.

“All my teaching is compressed into one month between January and mid-February too, so I can just get on with working with who I want to,” he added, saying that, as a young lecturer, he once published only a single paper in 1992.

“If your teaching takes up a huge amount of your time, you can’t publish much but once you have some good PhD students it gets easier.”

Professor Griffiths’ most frequent collaborators include Zsolt Demetrovics, editor of the Hungary-based Journal of Behavioral Addictions, with whom he has published 101 times. A blog by Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, noted that Professor Griffiths featured as a co-author on 13 per cent of that journal’s papers (51 out of 384 articles) over the past five years, prompting the journal’s publisher to assert that the articles had been independently reviewed and that there was no suggestion of preferential treatment.

For his part, Professor Griffiths felt that the real problem in hyper-prolific publishing lay in the sciences, where research group and laboratory leaders routinely add their names to papers, allowing them to clock up hundreds of authorial credits a year.

“As a rule of thumb you should be doing at least 5 per cent of the work [to get an author credit], so I cannot believe it when you see papers with 2,000 authors – that is the real story of ethics in publishing,” he said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com