Here, via a link provided by Mike, a reader, is a scholarly paper with 144 authors. UD‘s used to seeing thirty or forty med school professors listed at the tops of papers, but these are astronomers, and — as Carl Sagan used to say — there are billions and billions of them.
A writer at the Times Higher Education Supplement points out that there are 36.3 words per author in this piece, so assuming authorship is truly shared among the 144, each one wrote about two sentences.
April 7th, 2010 at 10:30PM
There’s nothing unusual about this. When I was contemplating grad school in physics, in the late 1980s, it wasn’t too hard to find a paper whose list of authors was nearly as long as the paper itself. Authorship means something different in the modern experimental sciences–especially large-scale, high-budget sciences–than it does in the humanities. An author in the sciences is someone who made a significant contribution to the results reported in the paper. If we in the humanities played by the same rules, the colleagues, referees, and perhaps even copyeditors whom we thank in our book acknowledgements or article notes would be counted as authors, though not first authors (order matters). Writing a paper is not the same as authoring a paper.
There are cases where scientists have played with this convention, such as the famous Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher–Bethe–Gamow_paper), to which George Gamow added his friend Hans Bethe’s name to mimic the first three letters of the Greek alphabet.
Ghost writing is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.
April 8th, 2010 at 7:28AM
Large collaborations are pretty common in high-energy physics. E.g., this is the ‘default’ CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) author list.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:30PM
In astronomy, it is often customary to write a paper describing the properties of a survey or instrument, and to include everyone involved with survey, including data reduction specialists, engineers and other technical personnel. This lets people who spend most of their time building scientific instruments to get credit for their years of work. Then, usually follow-up papers cite this original paper, and have fewer authors.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is one of the largest collaborations in astronomy, and is comparable in scale
to large particle physics experiments.
Chad Orzel makes a similar response at http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/04/long_author_lists_and_books_no.php