Drosophila muller f elements maintain a distinct set of genomic properties over 40 million years of evolution

However, it seems that the academy is already growing wise to the nature of these mass-authored papers. This year, for the first time, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings will exclude any papers that have more than 1,000 authors, as they are considered to be “so freakish that they have the potential to distort the global scientific landscape”.

When does authorship stop meaning anything useful?

In his blog post, Faulkes suggests a new rule: “If the number of authors on your paper can be measured in ‘kiloauthors’, having your name on the paper will not count for tenure and promotion purposes.”

Zen Faulkes, an invertebrate neuroethologist at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, questions on his blog whether every person made enough of a contribution to be credited as an author.

Fruit-fly paper has 1,000 authors

The answer probably has to do with the relative intensityof socialization and oral communication (Traweek, 1992,pp. 120 –123), along with the character of the organizationalstructures and value systems, which define collaborations inlarge-scale, high-energy physics and biomedical research.

Additionally, Ducor (2000) investigated asmall set of patents in molecular biology and their concom-itant publications in the scientific literature. Of the 40patent-article pairs examined, all but two listed more au-thors than inventors, which raises interesting questionsabout the relative stringency of the criteria employed forconferring authorship and inventorship.

0authors—a leading indicator of hyperauthorship?—in-creased from 1 in 1981 to 182 in 1994 (McDonald, 1995)and that the average number of authors per paper in theScience Citation Index (SCI)increased from 1.83 in 1955 to3.9 in 1999 (personal communication with Helen Atkins,Director of Database Development, Institute for ScientificInformation, Philadelphia, 2000). To use a couple of ran-dom examples: a 1997 article inNature(cited almost 600times since then) on the genome sequence of a bacteriumhas 151 coauthors, drawn from dozens of research labora-tories scattered across twelve countries (Kunst et al., 1997).A recent (Daily et al., 2000). two-page article inScienceonthe economic value of ecosystems has no fewer than 17authors and five acknowledgees. I

The standard model of scholarly publishing assumes awork written by an author. There is typically a single authorwho receives full credit for theopusin question. By thesame token, the named author is held accountable for allclaims made in the text, excluding those attributed to othersvia citations. The appropriation of credit and allocation ofresponsibility thus go hand-in-hand, which makes for fairlystraightforward social accounting. The ethically informed,lone scholar has long been a popular figure, in both fact andscholarly mythology. Historically, authorship has beenviewed as a solitary profession, such that “when we picturewriting we see a solitary writer” (Brodkey, 1987, p. 55). Butthat model, as Price (1963) recognized almost three decadesago, is anachronistic as far as the great majority of contem-porary scientific, and much social scientific and humanistic,publishing is concerned.