Before the precursors of today’s scholarly journals es-tablished themselves in the second half of the 17th century,scientists communicated via letters.

But while the traditional model of authorship persists, mostnoticeably in the humanities, it is no longer the sole ordominant model in certain scientific specialties.

uthorship (and therecognition that flows therefrom) is the undisputed coin ofthe realm in academia: it embodies the enterprise of schol-arship (Bourdieu, 1991; Cronin, 1984, 2000; Franck, 1999

o state the obvious, public affirmation of au-thorship is absolutely central to the operation of the aca-demic reward system, whether one is a classicist,sociologist, or experimental physicist.

Foucault,1977,p.125

Manguel(1997,pp.182–183)

Thisarticle(a)beginswithabrief,historicaloverviewofscholarlypublishing,focusingontheroleoftheauthorandtheconstitutionoftrustinscientificcommunication;(b)offersanimpressionisticsurveyandanalysisofrecentdevelop-mentsinthebiomedicalliterature;(c)explorestheextenttowhichdeviantpublishingpracticesinbiomedicalpublishingareafunctionofsociocognitiveandstructuralcharacteris-ticsofthedisciplinebycomparingbiomedicinewithhighenergyphysics,theonlyotherfieldwhichappearstoexhibitcomparablehyperauthorshiptendencies;and(d)assessestheextenttowhichcurrenttrendsinbiomedicalcommuni-cationmaybeaharbingerofdevelopmentsinotherdisci-plines

aproposaltoreplaceauthorsentirelywithlistsofcontributors(Rennie,Yank,&Eman-uel,1997)

thecentralissueisnotjustoneofmultipleauthorship,buttointroduceaneologismofhyperauthorship—

scaleofthephenomenonandassociatedethicalabuseshaveprovedtobesingularlyproblematicinthebiomedicaldo-main(e.g.,Houston&Moher,1996

Inthebiomedicalresearchcommunity,multipleauthorshiphasincreasedtosuchanextentthatthetrustworthinessofthescientificcom-municationsystemhasbeencalledintoquestion.Doc-umentedabuses,suchashonorificauthorship,havese-riousimplicationsintermsoftheacknowledgmentofauthority,allocationofcredit,andassigningofaccount-ability.Withinthebiomedicalworldithasbeenproposedthatauthorsbereplacedbylistsofcontributors(theradicalmodel),whosespecificinputstoagivenstudywouldberecordedunambiguously.Thewiderimplica-tionsofthe‘hyperauthorship’phenomenonforscholarlypublicationareconsidered.

lphabetization through weightedlisting to reverse seniority (e.g., Spiegel & Keith-Spiegel,1970; Riesenberg & Lundberg, 1990).

Following the 2004 report on pravastatin and a 2005 paper on tuberculosis among European patients receiving anti-HIV therapy (a report with “only” 859 authors), high-energy physics subsequently moved in to displace biomedicine in securing the upper tiers of science’s most mega-authored papers. The physics upsurge was striking. In 2010, Thomson Reuters indexed 16 papers in the main field of Physics with more than 1,000 authors each; in 2011, the figure was 120 such papers, with 44 Physics papers listing more than 3,000 authors.

For a more specific look at “hyperauthored” papers, Graph 3 covers 1992 through 2011 and tracks each year’s single paper with the highest author count. In the graph, the line sticks fairly close to the 500-author mark for the first decade, with no single paper exceeding 1,000 authors until 2004, when the threshold was resoundingly surpassed. As ScienceWatch reported five years ago, the paper in question was a study from Circulation Journal examining the efficacy of pravastatin in Japanese subjects with mildly elevated cholesterol levels; the published report includes more than 2,400 authors.

Multiauthor Papers: Onward and Upward

n fact, all the groupings in Graph 1 display a notable surge from 2010 onward. This is particularly striking on the bottom-most line denoting 1,000 or more authors. Aside from a few blips through 2009, this line was flat—until 2010, when Thomson Reuters indexed 17 papers with author counts above 1,000. The next year, 2011, this number increased nearly 10-fold, with more than 140 papers registering above the 1,000-author mark.

Observation of the rare Bs0 →µ+µ− decay from the combined analysis of CMS and LHCb data

Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mi>p</mi><mi>p</mi></math> Collisions at s√=7<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><msqrt><mi>s</mi></msqrt><mo>=</mo><mn>7</mn></math> and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments

Robert Garisto, an editor of Physical Review Letters, says that publishing the paper presented challenges above and beyond the already Sisyphean task of dealing with teams that have thousands of members. “The biggest problem was merging the author lists from two collaborations with their own slightly different styles,” Garisto says. “I was impressed at how well the pair of huge collaborations worked together in responding to referee and editorial comments,” he adds.

Physics paper sets record with more than 5,000 authors

Research Biologist Coins Term 'Kilo-Author' For Scientific Journal Articles

Am I getting, you know, recognition, you know? So if you're one of a thousand in a paper, you still have a paper to your name versus somebody like myself, who - I write a lot of papers just on my own. And I do everything by myself, and, you know, we both end up with one paper. SIEGEL: Of course, when one sees a thousand authors credited for a single article, it's - you know, it's hard to imagine a thousand people agreeing on a birthday card not to mention a scientific article.

Oh, yeah. It's certainly not as though - and you know that they didn't all contribute the same, right? It's not as though that everybody got five words and wrote five words out of the paper.

The rise of mass authorship and fractional authorship: Do too many cooks spoil the broth?

are that an author should have made substantial contributions to the study as well as to drafting the work, and should be able to identify all co-authors on a study and their contribution.

Earlier this year, a paper on rare particle decay published in Nature listed so many co-authors—about 2,700—that the journal announced it wouldn’t have room for them all in its print editions

His scientific renown is a tribute to alphabetical order

How Many Scientists Does It Take to Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands

The “romantic conception of authorship” mentioned earlier as a formative trend of the rights - based theory of intellectual property is evident in the first pe rspective: t he notion that ideas are individual achievements and of indeterminate origin (not reliant on a process of building) (Fisher, 1999, Sect. II. B).

Fisher points out that the rights - based, non - utilitarian theory is greatly influenced by two concepts: (1) the western ideology of property from Locke (that people are entitled to own the fruits of their labors, and should be rewarded in proportion to their contributions); and (2) the “romantic conception of authorship” of the divinely inspired individual genius or artist (1999, Sect. II. B).

I t i s t h i s b e d r o c k p r i n c i p l e o f c o p y r i g h t t h a t m a n d a t e s t h e l a w ' s s e e m i n g l y d i s p a r a t e t r e a t m e n t o f f a c t s a n d f a c t u a l c o m p i l a t i o n s . " N o o n e m a y c l a i m o r i g i n a l i t y a s t o f a c t s . " I d . , § 2 . 1 1 [ A ] , p . 2 - 1 5 7 . T h i s i s b e c a u s e f a c t s d o n o t o w e t h e i r o r i g i n t o a n a c t o f a u t h o r s h i p . T h e d i s t i n c t i o n i s o n e b e t w e e n c r e a t i o n a n d d i s c o v e r y : T h e f i r s t p e r s o n t o f i n d a n d r e p o r t a p a r t i c u l a r f a c t h a s n o t c r e a t e d t h e f a c t ; h e o r s h e h a s m e r e l y d i s c o v e r e d i t s e x i s t e n c e . T o b o r r o w f r o m B u r r o w - G i l e s , o n e w h o d i s c o v e r s a f a c t i s n o t i t s " m a k e r " o r " o r i g i n a t o r . " 1 1 1 U . S . , a t 5 8 . " T h e d i s c o v e r e r m e r e l y f i n d s a n d r e c o r d s . " N i m m e r § 2 . 0 3 [ E ] .

THE MAN WHOSE LIFE IS IN HARMONY WITH HIS TEACHING WILL TEACH WITH GREATER EFFECT.