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> an increase in thin papers of narrow scope, as well as ‘salami’ papers, where a single work is broken up and submitted as a set of smaller papers. There is also a marked increase in dense, AI-written papers. AI tools are making it easy for authors to flood arXiv [and others with] low-value papers.

I’m probably naive about how people operate in what is of course a very competitive landscape, but I don’t see who or how one actually benefits from having a bunch of ”salami” or ”AI” arXiv papers in their CV. Anyone got any good explanations?

They can inflate their citation count if those papers have a lot of self-citation. Also, a lot of outdated places use raw metrics, such as the number of papers, etc. But I would think the first reason is more impactful (difficult to assess if someone committed)

It's a common rigging method at the journal level too wherein journals can (and some prestigious ones do) coerce authors into citing papers published by the same journal to boost citation rankings.