“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.