Contemplating the nature of authorship

Just another quick link, this time to this post at Improbable Research.

As a usually-solitary author (well, writer: author‘s pretty hifalutin’ for my stuff), fortunately not in STM, I’m blown away by the notion that some gargantuan number of “authors” actually wrote an article in ScienceNature. (No, I’m not going to count the list.)

Update: Science, Nature, one of those… And I count (rather, Word’s replace function, replacing a comma with a comma, counts) between 190 and 192 authors for a six-page paper. Which, as Wow!ter’s comment notes, is tiny compared to an IgNobel Prize Winner.

Creative Commons License
This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Books and publishing, Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Contemplating the nature of authorship”

  1. WoW!ter says:
    October 31, 2006 at 6:19 pm

    Don’t forget the 1993 Ig Nobel prize for Literature. They listed a few more. http://www.improbable.com/ig/1993/1993-lit.html

  2. walt says:
    October 31, 2006 at 6:43 pm

    I just approved the above comment which had been trapped for moderation–and I now think I know why. Probably a combination of the link and the exclamation point in the username…

    In any case, 972 coauthors for a nine-page paper certainly trumps the modest example cited in the post. Presumably, each author contributed one short sentence…

    [Just realized that it\’s easy to count the number of authors using a Word replace command: for the example in the post, I get 191 or 192 authors for a six-page paper. Pikers; they need to recruit some additional coauthors.]