Page 42 - Becoming Metric Wise

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Scientific Research and Communication

found 13.8% of outer-layer contributors as coauthors in the papers he
investigated.
Referring to the issue of mega-authorship we note that Piternick
(1992) already discussed multiple authorship and pointed out an article in
high energy physics with 246 authors. In 1993 an article with 972 authors
(The GUSTO investigators, 1993) received the Ig Nobel prize for
Literature because it had an average of one author per two words. This
tendency for ever larger collaborating groups has not stopped as testified
by an article published in 2015 describing the size of the Higgs boson
(Aad et al., 2015). This article has 5099 authors (our count). Of the
33 pages, 24 contain the author list.
Increasing numbers of coauthors consequently led to an increasing
number of related problems such as:
Responsibility of authors for the contents of the manuscript (an ethi-
cal problem).
Possible ghost writing (another ethical problem).
Honorary authorship (another ethical problem).
Restrictions on the number of authors listed by a journal (an editorial
decision with possible consequences for some authors who become
“invisible”).
Appropriateness of using a group name (again making authors
invisible).
How to allocate credit for publishing and for receiving citations
(a problem related to evaluation, discussed further on in this book).

Contributors Listed in the Acknowledgments
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be
listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of such persons are those
who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department
chairperson who provided only general support. Of course funding and
material support should also be acknowledged. If persons are acknowl-
edged they must first give permission that their name is used in such an
acknowledgement.
2.3.5 Collaboration

It is well-known that the fraction of articles with more than one author is
increasing over the years. Smith (1958) and Price (1963) already observed this
phenomenon. The rise in multiple authorship has been confirmed by Weller
(2001, p. 121), Lipetz (1999), Schubert (2002) for authors in Scientometrics and
Behrens and Luksch (2011) in mathematics.