Slashdot Mirror
How Many Scientists Does It Take To Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands
An anonymous reader writes: The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the current spike in number of contributors cedited in scientific journals. The problem is highlighted by a recent physics paper which credits 5,154 researchers. The journal reports: "In fact, there has been a notable spike since 2009 in the number of technical reports whose author counts exceeded 1,000 people, according to the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which analyzed citation data. In the ever-expanding universe of credit where credit is apparently due, the practice has become so widespread that some scientists now joke that they measure their collaborators in bulk—by the 'kilo-author.'"
It is common practice for grad students to include more renowned professors in the lab etc on papers out of respect of their funding. Since your worth as a Primary Investigator (grant holder) is based on the number of papers on your resume, It is the only way of having a career. I've seen papers with 20+ PH.Ds on it where most of them, I know for a fact, have done practically nothing for the paper.
I needed to fix that for you. In general a well funded lab is so busy the PIs do almost nothing buy advise and review to make sure the grant work stays on progress. In reality Grads and Post Docs do 90% of the work in hopes of one day moving to a career in management aka a PI position. I've never meet a PI that has time to work the day to day minutia of science discovery in fact they often lament if they wanted to keep doing science they would have never started a lab.
Momento Mori
There have been efforts underway to standardize acknowledgement of data that came from other scientists. Most of us in the field have been calling the concept 'data citation' for a while (but it also refers to the act of linking, plus the string of text in the paper ... so it's a bit of a polysemous term at this point).
The basic idea is that for each grouping of data (I won't get into trying to define what a 'data set' is) that's being released, the group that's doing the release puts out a web page of information describing the data.
It would have the DataCite fields to specify how the data should be listed in the reference section of your paper, plus the w3c DCATterms to explain how to obtain the data. The DataCite schema allows you to acknowledge many different roles for people, allowing you to more clearly describe what different people's contributions were ... instead of just a long list of people, you'd have something more like movie credits.
This would solve much of the super collider issues, as you'd separately acknowledge the people who obtained & processed the data, who might have had no hand in the specific research that the paper describes. In my opinion, the authors should be people who agree with the findings that are being presented -- the folks who made the data should be acknowledged, but if they've had no chance to review the research that's being published (or have no ability to understand the researcher), they should not be listed as an author.
If you're interested in the topic, here are a few links that might be of interest:
If you're interested in participating in these efforts, either find a group in your research area, or for wider efforts, the Research Data Alliance's Data Citation Work Group.
I should also mention that there are similar efforts going on with scientific software. I've participating in some workshops (eg, RENCI's on data & software), but I'm not as active in that field. Some RDA have discussed starting up a group on software issues, but I think they'll be focusing more on Software Carpentry issues; for software citation I'd suggest contacting the Software Sustainability Institute.
ps. I've been included as a 'co-author' on papers where I've never had a chance to review the paper first. I think that all journals should check with all listed authors if they approve of the paper. (I've also peer reviewed a paper that had so many grammar errors in it that I suspect that none of the co-authors (most were native english speakers) had reviewed it) ... and it didn't reference the co-authors' earlier related articles). PeerJ does this and it also requi
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.