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.'"
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.
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.