I was looking for papers on the effect of natural plant hormones on the rooting ability of stem cuttings, but got distracted by a few other features on ISI Web of Knowledge. First I registered my new ResearcherID (A-7602-2008) (just in case it becomes the DOI for authors, see discussion elsewhere on NN, e.g. M. Fenners blog entry).
Then I was lured into the archive of ScienceWatch where I read the latest issue which featured a review on multi-authored papers by Christofer King.
Occasionally, I encounter an article with a ‘huge’ author list. In ecology, 20 authors is a lot. The minimum number of contributing authors for a paper to be included in the statistics of this review, however, was 50. I was surprised to see there are papers with more than 100, 200, and 500 authors, and they seem to become more numerous (see graph below).
(Multi-authored papers over time. © King, C. ScienceWatch November/December 2007)
But then came the cracker: in 2000 there was a report with 918 authors, and the current record holder is physics paper published in 2006… with 2512 authors. Imagine all these authors track-changing the manuscript!
(For the record, the paper can be found here: Aleph et al. 2006. Precision electroweak measurements on the Z resonance. Physics Reports, 427[5-6]: 257-454. (DOI))
Aleph? How appropriate.
That paper has seven groups on it, more than most ecology papers have authors.
I’m a bit “glazed over” with the authorship issue, forgive me — but I think it is worth distinguishing between a consortium or genuine collaborative effort, which might involve computer programming, building/maintaining big equipment (high-energy physics for example), years of effort to get a result (eg a genome sequence, though that is quick now) and so on, and “honorary” authorship where a professor uses clout to put his/her name on a paper to which no contribution, intellectual or otherwise, has been made.
In much of “big science”, many researchers would never get a publication if their efforts were not realised (eg bioinformaticians). In a profession where careers are judged by publications, this is hardly fair.
In my last published paper I have 82 coauthors, my personal record. The paper is the result of a consensus conference on the management of testicular cancer. The number of authors is of course too big, but it would have been difficult to decide on the main 5 or 10 authors. Even more so because the politics involved with authors from different countries and medical disciplines.
Wow, I did not know that it worked like this. In the stuff I read 20 authors is a ‘huge’ list as well.
Good that the ‘detailed’ author list and affiliations of ALEPH Collaboration et al (2006) were put in the Appendix (It counts 14 pages).
Honorary authorship is a common problem in my field. An extreme measure to avoid this, has been taken by a particular organisation that organizes a price for sustainable development. Entries may be published papers, but with no more than three (3) authors… If you work with a promotor and a copromotor and local partners (for me, in Ethiopia), this limit is really unrealistic.
By the way, _Nature_’s authorship policies are here. As you can see, we encourage authors to specify their contributions in the acknowledgements. (Martin, in your case, we’d probably put them in the accompanying online-only Supplementary Information, as it costs us 2 or 3 thousand pounds per printed page of Nature (without colour), and in 14 pages we could print three more full papers!)
I hope I didn’t sound rude with my glazed over" comment, apologies if so, Raf. We’ve had a lot of debate and conversation about authorship (numbers of, quality, etc) on Nautilus, our author blog – the “authorship” tag "is here at this link so I hope you’ll find time for a quick look at some of these posts, and please do add your comments, you are most welcome.
(Our recent editorial on accountability of authors is here)
Maxine, no offense taken – thanks for pointing me to the Author Accountability entry on Nautilus. I had a particular good coffee break reading about Jan Hendrik Schön on Wikipedia. He has more retraction notes than most guys in our lab have papers (and with all the papers undone, he is also about to loose his doctoral degree).
Oh yes, our poor physical sciences editor could fill up a few more long coffee breaks with his end of that story, poor man.