What is hyperauthorship?
Hyperauthorship is a current phenomenon in academia where some journal papers have more than 50 authors. The word is coined by Blaise Cronin and described in his paper here.
A study conducted by Sciencewatch in 2012 revealed that there is an increase in the number of journal papers having more than 50 authors over the years.
Just to give you an idea of hyperauthorship in academia, below is a few of the record-breaking journal papers in the number of authors.
This DNA sequence paper in Nature has over 100 authors.
Full title: The DNA sequence and biological annotation of human chromosome
Another fruit fly paper in g3journal has over 1000 authors.
The record-breaking paper?
This paper in High Energy Physics has more than 5,000 authors !!!
It is a scientific paper by research teams working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
There is a post here by @lemouth if you would like to know more about Large Hadron Collider and the international collaborations at CERN.
P/S: @lemouth has provided some meaningful inputs on this post. See his comment below.
Why is hyperauthorship more prevalent now and is this healthy?
Author credit
We have seen hyperauthorship happening in physics and some fields of biology. Analysts have pointed hyperauthorship as a result of an increasingly interdisciplinary research and many more collaborations, and hence, more authors and researchers deserve to be given some credit. But some also questioned how to identify author contributions and scientific responsibility since there are way too many authors. Did the authors in fact, help in the research, analysis, giving views on the experimental results, or just plainly data collection? If many authors only contributed to data collection which is more or less seen as an operator's work scope, is it "fair" to other authors who have contributed novel ideas or writing? For example, in the fruit fly paper, 900 authors listed on the paper were actually undergraduates who helped to edit draft genome sequences as part of a training exercise. In short, there is a worry that hyperauthorship phenomenon can erode the value of being a scientific author.
Network effect
Perhaps a bigger issue at large is also a worry that authors are playing around with the impact of the journal papers to stretch their reach and eventually boosting paper citations. This is indeed a possibility since long authors lists can mean a network effect. This network effect is explored and analysed in a paper here and have seen some correlation between network effect of professors and citations. If this phenomenon becomes common place, it may make it harder for universities and funding agencies to assess individual researchers based on citations and journal paper impact factors. This can put young and junior professors, or single authors, or smaller research teams at a huge disadvantage. It has even been speculated that connections may matter a lot when it comes to research grants and funding.This may mean that connections are increasingly more important in academia than just pure and simple good research. "No man is an island" in academia can't get more true than this, and it is time for professors to turn to more networking.
I've been very much appreciating these articles of yours lately. I hadn't heard of this before! So far I've never had more than 1 co-author on anything I've published, so I'm not quite in the hyperauthorship world yet :)
Thanks for appreciating! :-) So far, it is also true for me. The maximum number of authors in my journal paper is at most 3 including myself. So i am not there yet myself. But i am sure this phenomenon is brewing and deserve attention.
The LHC experiments are special. Both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations are collaborations of more than 3000 scientists. Both the guy who fixed the last screw of a detector and the one who designed an analysis have the right to sign the publications.
How does it work practically? Each member of the collaborations has a given number of service work to do for the collaboration. This grants him or her the right to sign the publications during one year. And we repeat each year. Concerning the who did exactly what, recommendation letters play that role. At the end, it is always doable to know the specific contributions of each individual researchers. And the publication / citation record of course does not play any role to get a position.
On the theory side, it is easier as we are generally collaborations of 1-5 people. I have a couple of papers with about 10 authors where each of the 10 authors had a role (really!).
Concerning the citation counts, our field may be a bit different from the others as well. Being part of committees selecting junior professors and researchers, it is clear that number of citations and publications are considered. But those are not the key players. What is important is to publish regularly and have his/her works recognized by the community. This information can be traced down without the citation counts. The main key players are the quality of the works, the recommendation letters and how the researcher sees himself or herself in the field (the research statement and project).
For instance, I have heard that in the US, all 750 GeV diphoton citations are ignored by the committees to be able to assess the impact of a given researcher. Which is a good thing in my opinion.
PS: maybe could you add a few words about that in your article ;)
PS2: thanks for advertising my post!
Thanks for providing your side of the story!
That's it! And I do not really understand why. Is it because it is an extraordinary equipment and knowledge of this equipment is so limited, so much so that even fixing a screw can be listed as an author in a paper?
Glad to hear that! :-)
You are welcome! Great to have you in steemit!
I forget to tell one important detail: you really need thousands of people to run and monitor these huge detectors.
That is how the LHC collaborations have fixed their rules. One provides service tasks for the collaboration and one can sign the papers. At the end, you need both people to monitor the detectors and people to analyze data, don't you?
But what you cannot do at the end is to compare LHC experimenters to other field scientists in therms of citations. This is just wrong.
I am not comparing. It may be clear to you how LHC collaborations are like because you know the rules. But people outside the LHC (like me, for e.g.) might not entirely know or understand the rules. And yes, now that you mention about thousands of people running and monitoring the LHC.
Then, it may be possible to list the LHC as an outlier outside of the science norm.
But, still, it really raised a lot of eyebrows....
I can understand that. I do no know how are the rules outside particle physics. Probably not that well :)
Yeah, the uber competitive nature of modern science is to blame for this I think. Everyone wants to pad their resumes, and get as many citations as possible to make themselves look good. These hyperauthored papers are a symptom of the larger problem that is brewing IMO.
I guess this may be a field dependent statement. Check my comment above. For high-energy theory paper, being an author means that work for the paper has been done.
Yeah, i think so. We usually see scientists 2 generations away just doing their research stuff. But as the world becomes more connected, more projects and more things are going on, it is changing the landscape in academia. And yes, people compete to get a good research job, and universities and funding agencies use citations and what-not to assess individual researchers. That is perhaps a bigger problem.
you know, I often encountered this while scouring through scientific article databases. I was a bit intrigued but I never had the interest to further understand why it may happen.
It's probably a bit of both worlds: leveraging on the power of a journal, trying to make a case for the importance of an article.
I would say it's nothing wrong if the research is good, but when non-positive intentions are pursued, it's definitely not a good thing. It would be interesting seeing how this will develop over the years.
Agree! :-) Will be interesting to watch
There are those proposing that a movie-style credits system would be more useful and more fair.
http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-credit-where-credit-is-due-1.15033#/whodidwhat
Nice! Just copying and pasting some quotes from the link:
That's a good practice. I always assume people will click the link and go read the article, because that's what I do.
Do all 5000 authors get a citation count when the paper is cited ?
hmmm.. yes...
Yes, but none of these citations will count when the 5000 authors will apply for grants or job. That's a specificity of this field.
@coinbitgold
Academia is a giant jerk circle
I must admit that i really LOL at this one
Sure! What else? :D
haven't heard of this one before! thx for the info
welcome!
Interesting post.