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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.'"
When everyone has been credited on dozens or hundreds of scientific papers it dilutes the perceived value of the average researchers involvement in each paper on which they claim credit. In the competitive worlds of grant application and academic positions, this means you have to be more worried about getting credit on as many studies as possible than about actually doing meaningful research on a single issue in order to make it through the initial review/HR screening process.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
But are all of those authors, and not data contributors?
But are all of those authors, and not data contributors?
Collecting the data is the actual work. Any idiot with a computer can make the analysis. And draw the wrong conclusions from that.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Absolutely agree that it's much ado about nothing. AND bad statistics ! CERN as an example is a lot of nonsense... it's a HUGE project with a HUGE population of PhD's, grad students, undergrads, managers, technicians, and everybody else. All working towards a common goal. And the science developed by those thousands of authors is an enormous collaboration, enabled by ... yeah, you guessed it, the World Wide Web. Which was INVENTED at CERN to enable... Collaboration.
WSJ, you look like a bunch of idiots. Stick to talking about stocks and rich people stuff. You suck at science.
Science today is judged by two metrics: papers published and students graduated.
It's important to actually understand that statement if you want to understand some of the quirks and problems with scientific culture.
You do not get credit for projects, advancements, talks, transition to industry, programs, results, etc. The government granting agencies only track papers published and students graduated when comparing different granting offices. Put another way, the government internally sets funding targets for each sub-field based on papers published and students graduated. Thus only papers published and students graduated are meaningful to science (again, not results, but papers).
Papers and # of PhDs became the currency of science, and are used to judge everything from the readiness of a student to graduate to the differential societal contribution of different scientific fields.
This has led to a situation where if you want to graduate students in fields like particle physics, you need to include them on the very rare papers that come out. Failing to graduate students would lead to a decrease in funding. For a student to get "credit" for working at CERN or NASA, that student needs to be on a paper. It's as simple as that.
Collecting the data is the actual work. Any idiot with a computer can make the analysis. And draw the wrong conclusions from that.
It's a shame that so many people seem to agree with this. I would put it exactly the opposite: any idiot can be trained to collect data; knowing what data to collect, why to collect it, how it fits in with 100 years of pre-existing data, and how to condense all of that into a concise but readable story is the difficult (and creative) part.
Maybe it's learned from student science labs, where you spend a lot of time getting the mechanics of an experiment to work, then plug the numbers into a pre-set template for analysis. Of course, those labs are exactly about training students to collect data, and not so much about doing science. Maybe it's learned from the media, where an uninformed reporter picks a bit of data out of a paper and concludes the green coffee extract is a fat-cure-all. Maybe it's just that it takes a lot of work to be able to distinguish good work that advances our state of knowledge from a mountain of data that doesn't really say anything.