The single author as endangered species
"Any issue of Nature today has nearly the same number of Articles and Letters as one from 1950, but about four times as many authors. The lone author has all but disappeared. In most fields outside mathematics, fewer and fewer people know enough to work and write alone. If they could, and could spare the time and effort to do so, their funding agencies and home institutions would not permit it." So writes Mott Greene of the University of Puget Sound in his recent (single-author, naturally) Nature essay "The demise of the lone author" (Nature 450, 1165; 2007).
Professor Greene goes on to discuss how this practice is affecting, and will affect, the system of awarding credit for work done, predicting that "in those fields where multiple authorship endangers the author credit system, we shall soon see institutionally initiated restriction on the number of authors. Paradoxically, this is likely to be endorsed by all parties as preferable to cinema-style specification of who actually did what. Most will prefer full credit for a few papers to little or no credit for many, considering where it matters most: university committees in charge of tenure, promotion and salary increments based on scholarly production. Given Nature's role in determining, as well as chronicling, how science is reported (see Nature 450, 1; 2007), interested parties could watch these pages to see whether a trend towards more restricted authorship is emerging."
Nature's policy on author contribution statements is here, and was introduced in an Editorial here.
Professor Greene's article is also available on the beautiful website that celebrates the history of the journal Nature.
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And the demise of the single author paper has been accompanied by the rise of the multi-author paper, as noted in a report from Science Watch on the number of papers published in recent years with 50 or more authors. The author, Christopher King, points out that the average number of authors per paper indexed by Thomson Scientific rose from 2.6 in 1990 to 3.8 in 2006, while the proportion of single-authored papers fell from 38% to 24% in the same period.
But it is the rise of the paper with large numbers of authors that is remarkable, with nearly 750 papers published in 2005 with attributions to more than 50 authors. The rise seems particularly sharp in physics, where there were 363 papers published with more than 100 authors. By contrast, in the biomedical sciences, the number of papers with more than 100 authors actually fell between 2004 and 2006, from 41 to 19. Astonishingly, however, we have now seen papers with around 2,500 authors: a paper with 2,458 authors (MEGA Study Group, "Design and baseline characteristic of a study of primary prevention of coronary events with pravastatin among Japanese with mildly elevated cholesterol levels," Circulation J., 68[9]: 860-7, 2004) and another with 2,512 authors (ALEPH Collaboration, et al., "Precision electroweak measurements on the Z resonance," Physics Reports, 427[5-6]: 257-454, 2006).
Posted by: Michael Jubb | January 10, 2008 08:57 AM