Pri reviji The Economist ugotavljajo, da imajo znanstveni članki vse večje število avtorjev. Na področju fizike in astronomije se je v obdobju od leta 1996 do 2014 povprečno število avtorjev povečalo s 4 na 6,5. V drugih vedah je porast sicer manjši, a vseeno očiten. Povečanje števila avtorjev pripisujejo kompleksnosti raziskav, ki se izvajajo v vedno večjih skupinah raziskovalcev. V fiziki naj bi veljalo tudi pravilo, da so med avtorji navedeni vsi, ki so vsaj malo prispevali k članku, česar se v drugih vedah ne držijo tako strogo. Vse več pa je tudi soavtorjev zgolj na osnovi pomembnega položaja, npr. direktorjev inštitutov. Nekateri uspejo tako objaviti tudi po več člankov na teden.
The Economist reviewed data on more than 34m research papers published between 1996 and 2015 in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. These were drawn from Scopus, the world’s biggest catalogue of abstracts and citations of papers, which is owned by RELX Group, a publisher and information company.
Over the period in question, the average number of authors per paper grew from 3.2 to 4.4. At the same time, the number of papers divided by the number of authors who published in a given year (essentially, the average author’s overall paper-writing contribution) fell from 0.64 to 0.51. The boom in co-authorship more than compensated for the drop in individual productivity, so that the average researcher notched up a slightly higher number of papers for his curriculum vitae: 2.3 a year compared to 2.1 two decades earlier.
Editors of physics journals do not bat an eye about papers with hundreds and, lately, even thousands of authors. In most other disciplines those who helped just a little are, instead, acknowledged in a thank-you section of the paper. But not always. Across the board, bylines are stretched by “guest-authors”. In that arrangement, a prominent expert, such as the director of research centre, is tagged as an author as a nod to his position or on belief that his name signals an important study. Some of the most published authors from American research centres, for example, add on average two to three papers a week to their name.
Vir: Daily chart: Scientific papers get more authors | The Economist in Why research papers have so many authors | The Economist
