What is it like to have 8778 authors on one paper?In a PDF, the author list alone takes up 17 pages. Someone tried to typeset all the names on the same page, and the words were too small to read.
This paper is from the ATLAS Collider Collaboration Group at CERNbreaking their previous record of 5,154 authors set in 2015.
In particle physics, there are more and more papers co-authored by thousands of people like this, and it is even more common for hundreds or thousands of authors. So that the ATLAS group basically has to make a note. This paper has a total of xx pages, and the author list starts from page x.
With so many people involved in the study, it can be difficult to distinguish who contributed the most. Therefore, the convention for papers in this field is to list them alphabetically by surname, regardless of the first author.
Here is an interesting fact. There is a physicist named Georges Aad. Because of the two letters A in his surname, he ranks first in the hundreds of papers published by the ATLAS group in the past. However, in 2016, a new academic star named Morad Aaboud appeared. In the future, for any papers that Aaboud participated in, Aad could only rank second.
The phenomenon of thousands of people co-authoring a paper has aroused the curiosity of many people. For example, due to the long research cycle, the work units of hundreds of people may have changed when the research is finally completed, and the pain of maintaining the author list is unimaginable. 10 of the signers on the paper were even dead at the time of publication.
It has also been suggested that if all the experts are involved in the paper, who will do the peer review?
What paper needs 8,000 co-authors?
Specifically for this paper,It is about using the Large Hadron Collider to study the Bose-Einstein correlation between particles(Bose-Einstein correlations).
The ATLAS collider used in the experiment was built in a cave 100 meters below the border between Switzerland and France. It is 46 meters long, 25 meters in diameter, and weighs 7,000 tons, which is equivalent to the weight of an Eiffel Tower.
ATLAS is running,Over a billion particles per second moving at close to the speed of light, collide with each other. The amount of data generated is equivalent to 20 simultaneous phone conversations for every person on the planet.
Of such a huge amount of data, less than one in a million is valuable for research. Screening and processing data in experiments is also a huge project.Need to be supported by more than 130 supercomputers distributed around the world.
The ATLAS cooperation organization is participated by 181 research institutions in 42 countries and regions around the world.Including a team of 3,000 scientific authors and 1,200 PhD students.
Among the 8,000 named authors of this paper, in addition to physicists, there are also a large number of engineers who maintain collider hardware, engineers who maintain IT hardware, and a large number of software workers who do data screening and analysis.
Cutting-edge research like this really can only be done by large-scale international collaboration. However, the resulting inflation in the number of signed papers has also caused concern among some scholars.
“The Collapse of the Academic Publishing System”
As early as 2015, the research conducted by the two collider teams ATLAS and CMS caused a heated discussion in the academic community. A 5154-authored paper with a more precise estimate of the size of the Higgs boson was published in Physical Review Letters. The paper version contains only 9 pages of references, and the last 24 pages are all authors and work units .
Another paper on the decay of rare particles was published in Nature at the same time. Due to the limited space of the magazine, it was finally decided that the author list would not appear in the paper version, but only published online. Nature also wrote a review article to explain this at the time.
Astrophysicist Peter Coles also talked about it on his personal blog, calling it the “collapse of the academic publishing system.” He believes that if thousands of authors are involved in the writing of the paper, each of them may only need to write a few words, which is of course unrealistic.
The actual situation is,Most of the thousands of authors may not have read this article, let alone write. Like his field of astronomy, instrument makers are also included in the list of authors.
In all seriousness, these people are not literally “authors” at all, but they did contribute to this research. Coles thinks the problem behind this is that it is unreasonable that a person’s contribution to scientific research can only be demonstrated by co-authoring papers.
He suggested that academic publishing could be like the credits at the end of a movie to identify the different divisions of labor and quantify their contributions separately.
A companion measure would be to change the system that evaluates a scholar only by the number of citations.
I have always believed that the modern scholarly publishing industry does not facilitate but hinders the exchange of research.
One More Thing
Finally, there are some interesting facts about the authorship of papers worth sharing. 8778 is not the paper with the largest number of authors at present,The highest record is 57,000 people.
It is the study that participated in the prediction of protein structure by playing games., In addition to the core research team of 9 people, 57,000 people were gamers participating at that time. This article was published on Nature, and it is amazing to be able to log in to Nature even after playing a game.
In addition, some netizens mentioned that a paper on the behavior of atoms published in 1975 had two authors signed, but only one was human Jack Hetherington, and the other was his cat.
This paper was actually completed by him alone, but according to custom, he used the plural “we” when writing.Typewriters at the time couldn’t do find and replacein order to avoid typing it all over again, he added the cat’s name…
It turned out that the paper had a lot of impact when it was published, and the cat received an invitation to join the university’s Faculty of Physics full-time to teach. When the paper was later sent to the International Conference on Physics, the signature also used a cat’s paw print.
So, in this paper of 8,778 people, how many cats are secretly sneaked in?
Reference link:
[1]https://twitter.com/jasonpriem/status/1528083437025828864
[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567
[3]https://atlas.cern
[4]https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/a-scientific-paper-with-5000-authors-is-absurd-but-does-science-need-papers-at-all/
[5]https://www.science.org/content/article/cat-co-authored-influential-physics-paper
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