For most academics, writing papers that may be eventually published in peer-reviewed journals is an important part of what we do. For some academics, it is the main thing they do (others have more emphasis on teaching courses at their university). Most academics always have a few projects they are working on, with perhaps a goal of finishing 2 or 3 a year, and thus having a regular pipeline of a few publications every few years. But some academics are much more prolific.
Take Daron Acemoglu for example. He has long been considered extremely prolific. So far in 2026, according to his Google Scholar page, he has had 15 papers that have either been published this year or come out as new working papers (that’s the bulk of them). In the past year (2025 and 2026), he has had publications in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature, among others (the AER paper was his Nobel lecture). For lower tier academics, that’s almost a lifetime of publications in 12 months or so. Acemoglu is extremely productive.
But I just discovered an economist that is, apparently, even more productive than Acemoglu, at least as measured by working papers. Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026. In the month of August 2026, he has written and posted to SSRN a total of 104 papers — and counting, since the month isn’t quite over.
These aren’t just short notes. Most of the papers are of normal academic length: 32 pages, 27 pages, 58 pages. The papers are both theoretical — involving complex math in some cases — or empirical, with regressions. Read any single paper, and it feels like just a normal academic paper, the kind of thing that an academic might work on for a few months. He even has a frequent co-author, which is common for economics papers (and helps to be more productive), a systems engineering professor named Vadim Sokolov, who is a co-author on a little over 100 of the papers this year.
What is going on here? Obviously the research productivity of Polson and his co-author Sokolov is aided by AI. Who isn’t using AI to increase their writing and research productivity these days? But I don’t think I have seen any academic, at least not in economics, that has really pushed it to the limit.
Presumably, many of these papers will get submitted to academic journals. I can imagine the editors of journals have a very hard job these days, as the number of papers submitted has likely increased significantly, while the time that referees have available has not increased much (of course, AI is likely making referees more productive too, though many journals ask you not to upload the paper into an AI program as a referee, since it is unpublished work when you are reviewing it).
I really don’t know where academic publishing goes from here. AI has made us all more productive in terms of output, but are we better at answering important questions in our science than pre-AI? Probably, though it is hard to know. Journals and the peer review process has traditionally been the filter to sort real contributions from gibberish. I don’t know how the peer review process continues in its current form given the massive increase in output (much of it good!) that we are seeing from academics. Dr. Polson is just a leading example of a growing challenge for academia.
Economist Writing Every Day 