DailyDirt: More Than A Little Collaboration Necessary

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, May 21st 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Science is getting more and more complicated as we learn more and it becomes nearly impossible for any single human being to understand, let alone perform, all of the experiments necessary to push the boundaries of knowledge out a little further. It seems that the field of particle physics is quite accustomed to publishing papers with "kiloauthors" without a problem, but the practice may be extending to other fields now as well. (Just imagine how long the copyright should last... lifetimes of the authors plus 70 years.)

The paper describing the first observation of the Higgs Boson has 5,154 authors listed. The Higgs Boson is responsible for imparting everything with mass, and apparently its observation imparts nearly every physicist with credit. [url]
A recent fruit fly paper named 1,014 authors and sparked a discussion about the meaning of authorship. The names of over 900 undergraduate students were included in this publication, recognizing those students' "significant intellectual contribution" to the project [url]
The previous record-holder for most number of authors for a scientific paper is "Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome" with over 2,900 authors. This paper missed credits for 6 authors and added them to the top of the list. Recognition is always appreciated..... [url]

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Filed Under: authorship, collaboration, drosophila, fruit fly, genomics, higgs boson, human genome, hyperauthorship, kiloauthors, large hadron collider, science

10 Comments

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jote, 21 May 2015 @ 5:30pm

Mistake in article
The link to the human genome paper actually points to the fruit fly paper, and vice versa.
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- Michael Ho (profile), 21 May 2015 @ 6:14pm
  
  Re: Mistake in article
  Whoops. Thanks. fixed that.
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Gwiz, 21 May 2015 @ 6:27pm

FUNNY on site mostly blockquotes and links to what are actually co-authors.
Techdirt writers jeer at copyright then put their name on posts to claim it's solely theirs.
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Gwiz, 21 May 2015 @ 6:31pm

FUNNY on site mostly blockquotes and links to what are actually co-authors.
Techdirt writers jeer at copyright then put their name on posts to claim it's solely theirs.
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- Ninja (profile), 22 May 2015 @ 3:21am
  
  Re: FUNNY on site mostly blockquotes and links to what are actually co-authors.
  Your point? Last time I checked TD (now) the posts were all public domain to do as you please. Elaborate your nonsense, please.
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- Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2015 @ 5:02am
  
  Re: FUNNY on site mostly blockquotes and links to what are actually co-authors.
  Is that why a post identifies the writer, I had no idea. Thanks for the eye opener.
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- Gwiz (profile), 22 May 2015 @ 5:12am
  
  Re: FUNNY on site mostly blockquotes and links to what are actually co-authors.
  Too funny, Blue.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 May 2015 @ 8:21pm

Although it's technically not a single paper, you are missing mention of the Classification Theorem for Finite Simple Groups with over 10,000 authors and several tens of thousands of pages.
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Ninja (profile), 22 May 2015 @ 3:39am

The days of a single person making groundbreaking discoveries are gone. With very few exceptions research today research is done with the help of a crew where most people contribute. When you see "Jon Doe discovers XYZ" you should read John Doe and his crew. So it makes sense to mention them all.
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- Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2015 @ 5:06am
  
  Re:
  The days when a single person claims a discovery may be going away, but then those claims were a bit presumptuous anyway. It's not like all those who came before did nothing. Standing upon the shoulders of giants and then claiming you did it all yourself is quite the stretch.
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