Anti-Meson said:
I reiterate it is the specific knowledge and research interest the professor holds at whether it is the same interests shared by the institution, which determines if the institution hire him.
So how does the institution determine their research interests? In the case of NYU, the way it worked was that they wanted some people and then changed the departmental research agenda specifically to attract those people. In other situations, it's a reaction to funding priorities. If you know that the government is about so spend massive amounts of money on energy research or if biotech is going to be a big thing, then you have a lot of incentive to orient your department research toward energy or biotech.
The big decision is when a department figures out what it's research priorities are. Once a department figures that out, I can tell you who is going to get hired. In astrophysics, if you give me a topic, then there are at most five people in the world that are eligible for the position.
Again, I don't think this is a bad thing. NYU is an amazing case study on how to create a prestige university quickly if you have $2 billion to spend, and it's interesting to see the shift at MIT from physics to biotech.
This is very rare for co-authoring professors. This is more likely when young postdocs accredit senior professors which they work with on a paper that turns out to be flawed. The professor doesn't necessarily share the same views.
I was specifically thinking about the Element 116/118 scandal and the Korean cloning scandal. One thing that I found curious and somewhat amusing was the fact that it became obvious that the senior scientists involved basically just rubber stamped the papers, and had no real idea what the junior scientist was doing, so once it became obvious that the junior scientist had faked their data, you had the senior co-authors in some seriously, seriously embarassing situations. Now it is rare for someone to totally make up data, but it is amusing what happens when someone does.
This goes to the way that research works in universities. It's an open secret that in most university research, it's the grad students, post-docs, and junior people that do most of the grunt work, and the role of the senior people is to a) get funding and b) offer some insight and review. It's not a bad system, but when you have a senior professor that manages to co-author 50 papers a year, it's much less a function of individual genius than management competence.
One other thing is that interesting is that all of this involves open secrets. There are situations in which a senior scientist does work on an original idea, and there are also situations in which they put their name on the paper in because they rubber stamped the findings. It's pretty simple to figure out which is which.
