

Scientific journals see a spike in number of contributors - tokenadult
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-many-scientists-does-it-take-to-write-a-paper-apparently-thousands-1439169200

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reptation
The idea that every author on a paper should "be accountable for all aspects
of the work” is not reasonable and in practice hardly ever true. That the
senior/last author should be accountable is a good idea.

Labor issues underlie a lot of this. The market is saturated for scientists
and the golden age POV (which admittedly I never heard anyone actually
espouse) that one would labor 5-7 years for ~1 first author paper leaves
recent phd's at a large disadvantage in the job market.

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CJefferson
The reasoning for this is quite well explained in the article.

Most universities measure staff, both current and applying, by various metrics
involves authorship (number of papers, number of citations (either total, or
h-index)). None of these measures care about number of authors on a paper, and
it is low cost to add an extra author. Generally speaking, it is always better
for n authors to be on n papers with n authors, than each write a solo paper.

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alephnil
Although, if you are a Phd-student or postdoc, you really need to be first
author on some papers if you want to make a further career in science, at
least in the biomedical fields.

The monster author lists seem to be most common in physics though, where you
have these large collaborative projects, like the LHC. I guess that makes it a
bit different, and that it therefore is acceptable for a Phd student or a
postdoc to be listed in the author list of these papers, and not necessarily
be first author.

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raboukhalil
Really interesting article.

If anyone wants to learn more, I recently wrote a similar article about the
rise in authorship in scientific journals:
[https://thewinnower.com/papers/the-rising-trend-in-
authorshi...](https://thewinnower.com/papers/the-rising-trend-in-authorship)

