8778 authors on one paper: each author wrote 5 words, and the signatures took up 17 pages

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What does it feel like to have 8,778 authors on a paper ?

In the PDF, the list of authors alone takes up 17 pages .

Someone had tried to typeset all the names on one page, and the type was so small it was hard to read.

This paper comes from the ATLAS collaboration at CERN , breaking their previous record of 5,154 authors set in 2015.

In the field of particle physics, papers with thousands of co-authors are becoming more and more common, and papers with hundreds or thousands of authors are commonplace.

So much so that the ATLAS group basically has to make a note when publishing a paper, saying that this paper has a total of xx pages, and the list of authors starts from page x.

Because there were so many people involved in the study, it is difficult to distinguish who made the greatest contribution.

Therefore, the convention for papers in this field is to arrange them in alphabetical order by surname , regardless of the first author .

By the way, an interesting fact is that there is a physicist named Georges Aad. Since there are two letters A in his last name, he is ranked first in the hundreds of papers published by the ATLAS group in the past.

However, in 2016, an academic star named Morad Aaboud emerged. From then on, Aad could only rank second in any paper in which Aaboud participated.

The phenomenon of thousands of people co-authoring a paper has aroused the curiosity of many people.

For example, because the research cycle is very long , hundreds of people may have changed their work units when the research is finally completed, and the pain of maintaining the author list is unimaginable.

Even 10 of the authors of this paper had died when it was published.

Some people also raised the question that if all experts are involved in the paper, then who will do the peer review ?

What kind of paper requires 8,000 co-authors?

Specifically, this paper talks about using the Large Hadron Collider to study the Bose-Einstein correlations between particles .

The ATLAS collider used in the experiment was built in a cave 100 meters underground at the border between Switzerland and France. It is 46 meters long, 25 meters in diameter, and weighs 7,000 tons, equivalent to the weight of an Eiffel Tower.

When ATLAS is running, more than a billion particles traveling at nearly the speed of light collide with each other every second. The amount of data generated is equivalent to 20 simultaneous telephone conversations for every person on Earth .

Of this huge amount of data, only less than one millionth is worth studying.

Screening and processing data in the experiment is also a huge project, which requires the support of more than 130 supercomputers distributed around the world.

The ATLAS collaboration involves 181 research institutions in 42 countries and regions around the world, including a team of 3,000 scientific authors and 1,200 doctoral students.

Among the 8,000 authors of this paper, in addition to physicists, there are also a large number of engineers who maintain the collider hardware, engineers who maintain IT hardware, and a large number of software workers who do data screening and analysis.

Cutting-edge research like this can really only be accomplished through large-scale international collaboration.

However, the resulting increase in the number of paper authorships has also caused concern among some scholars.

“The Collapse of the Academic Publishing System”

As early as 2015, the collaborative research between the ATLAS and CMS collider teams sparked heated discussions in the academic community.

A paper with 5,154 authors and a more precise estimate of the size of the Higgs boson was published in Physical Review Letters . The paper version of the paper, including references, is only 9 pages long, and the next 24 pages are all authors and work units.

Another paper on rare particle decay was published in Nature at the same time .

Due to limited space in the journal, it was ultimately decided that the author list would not appear in the print edition and would only be published online.

Nature also wrote a special commentary article at the time to explain this.

Astrophysicist Peter Coles also discussed the incident on his personal blog, calling it "a breakdown in the academic publishing system . "

He believes that if thousands of authors participate in writing a paper, each person may only need to write a few words, which is of course unrealistic.

The reality is that most of the thousands of authors may not have even read this article, let alone written it.

In his field of astronomy, instrument manufacturers are also listed as authors.

To be precise, these people cannot be considered "authors" in the literal sense, but they have indeed made contributions to this research.

Coles believes that the problem behind this is that it is unreasonable for a person's contribution to scientific research to be reflected only through co-authored papers .

He suggested that academic publishing could clearly define different divisions of labor like the credits at the end of a movie and quantify their contributions separately.

A complementary measure would be to change the system that evaluates a scholar solely by the number of cited articles.

I have long argued that the modern academic publishing industry hinders rather than facilitates the communication of research.

One More Thing

Finally, there are some interesting things worth sharing about paper authorship.

8778 is not the paper with the largest number of authors at present; the highest record is 57,000.

This is the research on protein structure prediction by playing games. In addition to the core research team of 9 people, 57,000 people were game players who participated at the time.

This article was published in Nature. It is amazing that a game can be published in Nature.

Another netizen mentioned that a paper published in 1975 on the study of atomic behavior had two authors, but only one was a human, Jack Hetherington, and the other was his cat.

This paper was actually completed by him alone, but as per custom, he used the plural pronoun "we" when writing.

The typewriters at the time could not do search and replace, so to avoid typing it all over again, he added the cat's name...

As a result, this paper had a great influence after it was published, and the cat was invited to join the university's Department of Physics as a full-time teacher.

Later, when I sent the paper to an international conference on physics, I signed it with a cat's paw print.

So, in this paper written by 8,778 people, who knows, maybe a few cats have sneaked in?

Reference links:
[1] https://twitter.com/jasonpriem/status/1528083437025828864
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567
[3] https://atlas.cern
[4] https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/a-scientific-paper-with-5000-authors-is-absurd-but-does-science-need-papers-at-all/
[5] https://www.science.org/content/article/cat-co-authored-influential-physics-paper