Academic Articles with Secondary School Authors Are Mostly Come from China
In 2024 (up to July 20th), the international academic publisher Elsevier has published 77 articles with author(s) from secondary school. Most of them (74) were form China, the remaining 3 were from the United States.
Among the 74 articles from China, eight were about education, children development and health, there articles were more like from the teachers and/or staffs from the schools, while the other 66, it is not conclusive whether they were authored by the teachers/staffs or were authored by the students.
Most of them these 66 articles were about material science, biology, and cell biology, but not related to children development nor education. These articles were more likely from the students at the secondary schools. They may take part in some kind of "science and technology program" hold by the universities, and therefore authored with the university students and professors.
However, this kind of authorship raise concerns. The students from secondary school and coauthored in the articles were argued to play little contribution to the articles, and did not meet the requirement for the authorship.
Some authorship of these secondary school students was resulted from the pressure by the professors who had strong relationship to the secondary school students. One of the examples was SONG Shijian, son of SONG Erwei, a top professor in Sun Yat-Sen University. The SONG Shijian's authorship in those papers published during his time in secondary school was questionable.
This matter is similar to the issue "gifted authorship". For a long time, scientific community is asking the publishers to take actions to fight against this matter, but the publishers, including Elsevier, move very slowly.
Although the number of publications from secondary school students was very low, compared to the huge academic publication every year, multiple articles were found to by coauthored by different students from Shenzhen Middle School. The pattern for these publications need more analysis.
It is cautioned that this article is not a cross-sectional analysis, and this article can not tell how serious the problem is, the only goal for this article is to draw scientific community's attention to this matter.
METHOD: These articles were obtained by searching on the sciencedirect.com with “Author affiliation: Middle School” and “Year(s): 2024”. The keywords “secondary school”, and “high school” were not tried as “Author affiliation”. More papers may be obtained if we combine the results from these keywords. But we want to address that the propose of this article is to draw attentions from the scientific community, but not to show the whole picture of the publications from secondary school.
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