In my collaboration you get to be an author on every paper (around 100 a year) just by doing any work in the experiment. I'm an author on around 1000 papers that I haven't even downloaded, much less read.
It's a thing for sure. It would be great in a post-scarcity society where everyone can be funded regardless of what they do, but people are still competitive. For example:
- There are still internal databases (which funding agencies can access), people fight over who gets on which paper there. There are people trying to game that system as much as they would try to game a public metric.
- There's a whole cottage industry of people in these collaborations who simulate the experiment, show that it could do something, and then publish a paper (with a shorter author list) about it. This is so popular that many of these people never get around to doing the real experiment.
Unfortunately I don't think we've broken free of Goodhart's Law so easily.
