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 :)