How does it feel to have 8778 authors in a paper In PDF, the author list alone takes up 17 pages . Someone tried to put all the names on the same page, and the words were too small to see clearly. This paper is from the atlas collider cooperation group of the European Center for nuclear research, setting a record of 5154 authors in 2015.
In particle physics, there are more and more papers written by thousands of people, and hundreds of thousands of authors are even more common. So that the atlas group basically needs to note that this paper has a total of XX pages, starting from page x is the list of authors.
Because there are too many people involved in the research, it is difficult to distinguish who contributes the most. Therefore, the practice of papers in this field is to arrange them alphabetically by surname, regardless of the first author.
Incidentally, a physicist named Georges aad ranks first in hundreds of papers published by Atlas Group in the past because his last name has two letters a. However, in 2016, there was an academic star named morad aaboud. In the future, aad can only rank second for all the papers aaboud participated in.
The phenomenon that thousands of people co authored a paper has aroused many people's curiosity. For example, due to the long research cycle, the work units of hundreds of people may have changed at the time of final completion, and the pain of maintaining the author list is unimaginable. Even 10 signatories to this paper died at the time of publication.
It was also suggested that if all experts participated in the paper, who would do the peer review?
What paper needs 8000 co authors?
Specific to this paper, is about the study of Bose Einstein correlations between particles using the Large Hadron Collider .
The atlas collider used in the experiment was built in a cave 100 meters underground at the border between Switzerland and France. It is 46 meters long, 25 meters in diameter and weighs 7000 tons, equivalent to the weight of an Eiffel Tower.
Atlas runs, more than 1 billion particles per second move at close to the speed of light and collide with each other. The amount of data generated is equivalent to 20 telephone conversations per person on earth at the same time.
Less than one millionth of such huge data is of research value. Screening and processing data in the experiment is also a very huge project, which needs to be supported by more than 130 supercomputers distributed all over the world .
Atlas cooperation organization is participated by 181 research institutions in 42 countries and regions around the world, including a team of 3000 scientific authors and 1200 doctoral students .
Among the 8000 signed authors of this paper, in addition to physicists, there are also a large number of engineers who maintain the collider hardware, engineers who maintain the IT hardware, and a large number of software workers who do data screening and analysis.
Such cutting-edge research can only be completed by large-scale international cooperation. However, the resulting expansion of the number of signatures has also aroused the concern of some scholars.
"Collapse of academic publishing system"
As early as 2015, the research on the cooperation between the two collider teams of atlas and CMS once set off a hot debate in the academic community. A paper signed by 5154 people and made a more accurate estimation of the size of the Higgs boson was published in the Physical Review express. The paper body, including references, has only 9 pages, and the next 24 pages are the author and work unit.
In the same period, another paper on the decay of rare particles was published in nature. Because of the limited layout of the magazine, it was finally decided that the author list would not appear in the paper version, but only published online. Nature also wrote a review article to explain this at that time.
Astrophysicist Peter Coles also talked about the matter on his personal blog, calling it "the collapse of the academic publishing system". He believes that if thousands of authors are involved in thesis writing, everyone may only need to write a few words, which is certainly unrealistic.
The reality is that most of the thousands of authors may not have read this article , let alone written it. Like his field of astronomy, instrument manufacturers will also be included in the list of authors.
Seriously, these people are not literally "authors", but they did contribute to this study. Coles believes that the problem behind this is that it is unreasonable for a person's contribution to scientific research to be reflected only through co authored papers.
He suggested that academic publishing could clarify the different division of labor like the cast table at the end of the film, and quantify their contributions respectively.
The supporting measure is to change the system of evaluating a scholar only by the number of cited articles.
I have always believed that the modern academic publishing industry is not promoting but hindering the exchange of research.
One More Thing
Finally, there are some interesting things to share about the signature of the paper. 8778 is not the paper with the largest number of authors at present, the highest record is 57000 .
*That's the study on protein structure prediction by playing games *. Except for the core research team of 9 people, 57000 people were game players at that time. This article is published in nature. It's amazing to be able to board nature even if you play a game.
Another netizen mentioned that a paper on atomic behavior published in 1975 was signed by two authors, but only one was human Jack Hetherington and the other was his cat.
He actually completed this paper by himself, but according to custom, he used the plural person "we" when writing* At that time, the typewriter could not find and replace *. In order to avoid typing the whole again, he added the cat's name
As a result, the paper had a great influence after it was published. The cat also received an invitation to teach full-time in the College of physics. Later, when the paper was sent to the International Conference on physics, the signature also used the paw print of a cat.
So, in this paper of 8778 people, it is impossible to say how many cats have sneaked in?
Reference link:
[1]https://twitter.com/jasonpriem/status/1528083437025828864
[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567
[5]https://www.science.org/content/article/cat-co-authored-influential-physics-paper