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.'"

Comments

Re:This is just the looong tail of the distributio

[umafuckit]

But the question is actually if it makes sense to have many authors on a paper. If you have 10 or more it should already raise a warning flag.

One of the examples they highlight is CERN, where thousands of researchers do indeed contribute. Since the current way of assigning credit in academic circles is to put people on a paper, it's hard to see what else can be done. Yes, it's a bit weird but it happens very rarely. I don't see what the "warning flag" is being raised in aid of. There's no reason to think the science is worse in a large author count paper. If I was interviewing someone with only authorship in high author count papers then I'd ask the the appropriate questions. Then again, I'd likely ask those questions anyway. I've interviewed first authors (of a paper with under 5 authors) who couldn't explain the analyses described in the article. There are warning flags, but the number of authors likely isn't one of them.

For a few projects it makes sense

[Antique Geekmeister]

The Human Genome Project, assembling work from thousands of researchers, developers, and technicians worldwide had hundreds of authors.

                        http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

It can make sense in such a large project to list as many of the contributors as possible.

Every lab technician wants credit

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It mainly happens in high energy physics. The high energy collider labs are run by a large team of scientists and every one in the control room who pushed the buttons wants to be credited as a contributor to the experiment.

Scientists have played pranks with co-author names. The famous Alpha-Beta-Gamma paper comes to mind. Low temp physicist Hetherington had included his dog as a co-author so that he could use "we" in the paper.

The spoof paper authored by S Candlestickmaker done by a student of S Chandrashekar was very famous. The student later lamented that spoof paper was his best known contribution to science than his PhD or his entire research career. It is telling I remember S Candlestickmaker but not the student's name.

It is a problem

[The Real Dr John]

I publish journal articles and reviews fairly regularly, and we only rarely include authors who did literally nothing other than be in the lab or consult. It happens occasionally when a young researcher has been working hard on a related project, but still does not have nearly enough data for a whole new paper. There are some cases where a researcher in another lab provides a reagent you can't get anywhere else, but even then they often review the final manuscript and make suggestions. However, I think that in larger labs this may occur much more often. Our lab is small (3 scientists and 2 student researchers). On one recent paper several collaborating scientists at NIST worked extensively on a part of the project that did not pan out, so they are in the author list even though their work does not appear in the paper. But you can't say they didn't do any work. There are always issues like this when deciding on authorship that are unique to each situation.

However, the physics and genetic articles that have thousands of authors are much harder to justify, and absurd to even think that anyone would go through the list. All but the first few authors are lost in any citation list when the paper is cited. No one will ever see the other names. Plus, it really messes with citation software like Reference Manager (newer versions of Endnote seem to handle it well).

The bigger journals now require author contributions to be listed, which is a good thing (and would be very difficult on a paper with 1500 "authors")