The Growth of Scholarly Co-Authorship: How Many Scientists Does It Take to Write an Academic Paper?

This is pretty cool, if not a bit absurd.

At WSJ, "Apparently, Thousands: Scientific journals see a spike in number of contributors; 24 pages of alphabetized co-authors":

A Frenchman named Georges Aad may have the most prominent name in particle physics.

In less than a decade, Dr. Aad, who lives in Marseilles, France, has appeared as the lead author on 458 scientific papers. Nobody knows just how many scientists it may take to screw in a light bulb, but it took 5,154 researchers to write one physics paper earlier this year—likely a record—and Dr. Aad led the list.

His scientific renown is a tribute to alphabetical order.

Almost every paper by “G. Aad et al.” involves so many researchers that they decided to always list themselves in alphabetical order. Their recent paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, features 24 pages of alphabetized co-authors led by Dr. Aad. There is no way to tell how important each contributor might be.

“Basically, this guy has won the academic lottery,” said Vincent Larivière, a professor of information science at the University of Montreal who studies scholarly communications.

From Aad to Zoccoli, these physicists, who conduct experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, are a measure of an accelerating trend in science—the growth in the number of people who get credits.

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.”

Earlier this year, a paper on rare particle decay published in Nature listed so many co-authors—about 2,700—that the journal announced it wouldn’t have room for them all in its print editions. And it isn’t just physics. In 2003, it took 272 scientists to write up the findings of the first complete human genome—a milestone in biology—but this past June, it took 1,014 co-authors to document a minor gene sequence called the Muller F element in the fruit fly.

“There was a joke that anyone who had ever seen a fruit fly got to be an author,” said neuroethologist Zen Faulkes at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who tracks the spiraling number of scientific co-authors.

The exponential growth has a number of causes, one of which is that experiments have gotten more complicated. But scientists say that mass authorship makes it harder to tell who did what and who deserves the real credit for a breakthrough—or blame for misconduct.

More than vanity is at stake. Credit on a peer-reviewed research article weighs heavily in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. “Authorship has become such a big issue because evaluations are performed based on the number of papers people have authored,” said Dr. Larivière.

Usually, the position of first author confers the most prestige, identifying the person who contributes the most to a research enterprise. The last author is usually the senior scientist who oversees the experiment.

Even before Dr. Aad and his fellow physicists adopted their alphabetical order, there have been unorthodox approaches to ranking co-authors. The co-authors of a 1974 paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology ranked themselves by playing a croquet tournament, according to a footnote. The authors of a 1998 paper in the journal Molecular Ecology arranged the order of co-authors “by proximity to tenure decisions,” according to their acknowledgments.

But now the sheer numbers are prompting scientists to come up with new ways to keep track. Some researchers are developing computer software to decipher the taxonomy of scientific credit. “The challenges are quite substantial,” said Marica McNutt, editor in chief of the journal Science. “The average number of authors even on a typical paper has doubled.”

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