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 th

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.