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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 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.
soylentnews.org
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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")
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
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.