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> The vast majority of hyperprolific authors (7,888 author records, 86%) published in physics. In high-energy and particle physics, projects are done by large i

> The vast majority of hyperprolific authors (7,888 author records, 86%) published in physics. In high-energy and particle physics, projects are done by large international teams that can have upwards of 1,000 members. All participants are listed as authors as a mark of membership of the team, not for writing or revising the papers. We therefore excluded authors in physics. While this is true in general, I'm part of one of these Collaboration at LHC and I find that publishing a paper is taking a lot of effort and revision (not talking about actual research) and would involve a couple of hundred people between the review committee, physics group and the collaboration at large who post questions, comments and revise every bit of information. It is amazing to always see how to final product is almost very different from the first draft in each aspect. This process on average takes a couple of months. I will confess that I'm guilty of not participating into this duty for each paper but I'm always sure that there are many people who will do that. Regarding authorship for papers I did not involve in writing directly, I'm fine with that norm in our field because that's fair. Most of the work needed to produce results is not doing the actual analysis for the data but operating this huge machine and the service work (software development, control room shifts, hardware R&D Data quality …etc) is most of the work. People usually find this strange (more polite description of them saying it is absurd) but let's be real. The era of individual contribution (or small group) in experimental particle physics had almost ended by the cathode rays.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
"and would involve a couple of hundred people between the review committee, physics group and the collaboration at large who post questions, comments and revise every bit of information." I'm curious whether much of this work materially differs from the work done by peer reviewers in the journal review process. If it does then authorship may be fine, if it doesn't then it seems that either the internal reviewers should be separately listed on the article as reviewers instead of authors, or that a journal's peer reviewers should also be listed as authors. "Regarding authorship for papers I did not involve in writing directly, I'm fine with that norm in our field because that's fair. Most of the work needed to produce results is not doing the actual analysis for the data but operating this huge machine and the service work (software development, control room shifts, hardware R&D Data quality …etc) is most of the work." Whenever I do this kind of work and am offered an authorship I ask for an acknowledgement instead. It's akin to me to citing the company you purchased your equipment and reagents from (actually designing and constructing your equipment is an important part of the job, too). You cite them, you don't add them as a co-author.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  Well, quite obviously the peer reviewers the journal selects can't be from inside the experiment, and are thus frequently less well informed than collaboration members on which bugs in the software to look out for for example.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    How well informed is Random Undergrad Co-Author? And why should being informed on something lead to an authorship? To relate again to material purchases, often enough researchers ask the commercial tech support for details on using the equipment or reagents. This still doesn't make the tech support person a co-author.
    - SiempreViernes 4y ago
      Please put the goalposts back to where they where when I answered the question about differences between internal and external reviwers.
Bedon292 4y ago
It definitely feels a little odd. If everyone is an author, then does authorship really matter? Is authorship broken out in any way? I would think it could be useful to do something like credits on a movie. Here are the writers, the directors, the producers. And then here is the lighting team, and this team worked on these special effects, this other team on these other effects, etc.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  Often the core team gets to be the corresponding authors.
- dguest 4y ago
  To answer your second question: no. On a few of the biggest experiments the author list is completely flat and alphabetical. From outside the collaborations there's no way to know who actually wrote the paper or did any of the work described therein. The best argument to keep it this way is that fewer people fight about who gets credit. But anyone with internal access and a bit of experience knows where to look. If you want to verify someone's contribution from the outside, you just have to find one of the other 3000 authors and ask them to do some sleuthing. Personally I'd answer "no" to your first question too, but that's a bit more subjective and depends on the funding agency. Particle physicists have, for better or worse, thrown a wrench into the whole idea of authorship metrics, but they did so in a way that would benefit them by default: if the funding agency has a publication quota, everyone passes! Of course this causes a few problems: - If your funding agency hasn't caught on and you aren't in particle physics, you are effectively being cheated out of a better ranking. - Many agencies are now disqualifying publications with over 1000 authors, in which case particle physicists get zero publications. To deal with the second case, it's actually quite common to see smaller groups of scientists from these collaborations writing papers using their own simulated data, as a way to get publications with fewer authors. I would definitely count myself in the group that considers this situation absurd, but that's where we are.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago

"and would involve a couple of hundred people between the review committee, physics group and the collaboration at large who post questions, comments and revise every bit of information." I'm curious whether much of this work materially differs from the work done by peer reviewers in the journal review process. If it does then authorship may be fine, if it doesn't then it seems that either the internal reviewers should be separately listed on the article as reviewers instead of authors, or that a journal's peer reviewers should also be listed as authors. "Regarding authorship for papers I did not involve in writing directly, I'm fine with that norm in our field because that's fair. Most of the work needed to produce results is not doing the actual analysis for the data but operating this huge machine and the service work (software development, control room shifts, hardware R&D Data quality …etc) is most of the work." Whenever I do this kind of work and am offered an authorship I ask for an acknowledgement instead. It's akin to me to citing the company you purchased your equipment and reagents from (actually designing and constructing your equipment is an important part of the job, too). You cite them, you don't add them as a co-author.

SiempreViernes 4y ago
Well, quite obviously the peer reviewers the journal selects can't be from inside the experiment, and are thus frequently less well informed than collaboration members on which bugs in the software to look out for for example.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  How well informed is Random Undergrad Co-Author? And why should being informed on something lead to an authorship? To relate again to material purchases, often enough researchers ask the commercial tech support for details on using the equipment or reagents. This still doesn't make the tech support person a co-author.
  - SiempreViernes 4y ago
    Please put the goalposts back to where they where when I answered the question about differences between internal and external reviwers.

Bedon292 4y ago

It definitely feels a little odd. If everyone is an author, then does authorship really matter? Is authorship broken out in any way? I would think it could be useful to do something like credits on a movie. Here are the writers, the directors, the producers. And then here is the lighting team, and this team worked on these special effects, this other team on these other effects, etc.

SiempreViernes 4y ago
Often the core team gets to be the corresponding authors.
dguest 4y ago
To answer your second question: no. On a few of the biggest experiments the author list is completely flat and alphabetical. From outside the collaborations there's no way to know who actually wrote the paper or did any of the work described therein. The best argument to keep it this way is that fewer people fight about who gets credit. But anyone with internal access and a bit of experience knows where to look. If you want to verify someone's contribution from the outside, you just have to find one of the other 3000 authors and ask them to do some sleuthing. Personally I'd answer "no" to your first question too, but that's a bit more subjective and depends on the funding agency. Particle physicists have, for better or worse, thrown a wrench into the whole idea of authorship metrics, but they did so in a way that would benefit them by default: if the funding agency has a publication quota, everyone passes! Of course this causes a few problems: - If your funding agency hasn't caught on and you aren't in particle physics, you are effectively being cheated out of a better ranking. - Many agencies are now disqualifying publications with over 1000 authors, in which case particle physicists get zero publications. To deal with the second case, it's actually quite common to see smaller groups of scientists from these collaborations writing papers using their own simulated data, as a way to get publications with fewer authors. I would definitely count myself in the group that considers this situation absurd, but that's where we are.