Below is a pre-print of a scientific paper that describes the discovery of a new exoplanet
[2506.18550] TOI-1846b: A super-Earth in the radius valley orbiting a nearby M dwarf
It’s certainly interesting research, but I don’t think it’s anything particularly noteworthy. The paper is about 20 pages, maybe half of which is text and the rest charts and diagrams.
It has 45 co-authors.
Do they all contribute to the text? Or are some programmers and assistants?
Who wrote the actual text is a minor detail. But they all contributed to the research.
How much they each contributed to the research might or might not be reflected in the order in which they appear in the author list. Usually, this is so, but large research groups sometimes just list everyone alphabetically.
I talked to a guy who did occasional research at CERN (he was my mother’s second husband) and he mentioned the same thing about papers 20 years ago. The problem is that time on the accelerator is expensive and hard to get, so a large number of people ask for the same experiment for the same purpose, and generally pile on with the same paper. After all, the alternative is almost 45 identical papers using the same charts and graphs. Possibly, a number are the assistants and PhD students who do some side calculations, tidy up the paper, etc. Plus, never underestimate the “publish or perish” imperative for others to pile on for the least bit of consultation. (I think there was a Young Sheldon episode like that).
Another point to ponder - Banting and Best did the research to isolate insulin and prove that it could help save the life of diabetics. It went on to save millions. Best was the assistant who helped Banting with the experiments on dogs. When it came time to award the Nobel prze, it went to…
…wait for it…
Banting and McLeod. McLeod was head of the lab where the experiments were done. Best was excluded over Banting’s objections, because as McLeod said, “grad students don’t get Nobel prizes.” (Apparently Banting afterwards gave half his share of the prize to Best.)
Interesting. In this case, it looks to be a random order for the first fifteen names or so, then alphabetical.
In the social sciences, the research assistants are usually confined to a footnote, if that. But astronomy is clearly a different beast.
It’s largely a matter of etiquette, not formal rules, and so practices can vary tremendously. When I was an undergraduate astronomy major, we all had to do observations and analysis of the data we gathered, with the result that the head of the department published a lot of papers that were basically just the observations and data analysis we did, with himself listed as the sole author, and us students tucked away in a footnote. On the other hand, for some projects, everyone who does any work at all involving the big expensive instrument is part of the big research team, and everyone who’s part of the big research team is on the author list for every paper.
Scientific research can involve massive, collaborative projects. For some things it is completely reasonable that dozens of people may have made important intellectual contributions to the paper. If any of those contributions were removed, the paper might not have been possible.
I don’t know enough about how astronomy research works to comment on that paper, but in my field a paper can have contributions from teams involved in study design, subject assessment, molecular genetics, imaging (MRI), data preparation, and data analysis. Each of those teams may be several people. So a paper like “Genetics of some brain region in people with MDD” may have dozens of authors. Remove the contribution from any team, and the research leading to the paper doesn’t happen.
Conventions are different in different fields, but in the areas I’m involved in the general rule is to look at the first author and last author (unless the names are explicitly alphabetical). The first author (or first few) are probably responsible for most of the text of the paper, and the last author is going to be the senior person whose lab the work comes from.
This isn’t even getting into things like strategic authorship. For example, someone’s name was put on a grant as an external consultant to help get the grant funded. Now they are included on all papers that come from that research, even though their actual input may be small. Or, inviting scientists that will be critical of the paper to be authors and help make sure the conclusions are balanced, when really, if they are authors they can’t be reviewers.
ArXiv is not a journal, so articles uploaded there aren’t peer reviewed.
This is important because there are ethical guidelines for authorship that most reputable journals adhere to. The one I’m most familiar with are from the ICMJE.
Part of the submission process will involve a declaration of contribution for each author. People involved in the preparation of the manuscript who do not qualify as authors should be acknowledged in the body but not given authorship.
I went ahead and looked up the submission guidelines for the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics (highest impact factor astronomy journal I could easily find), and they do indeed use the ICMJE criteria.
As a Grad Student, my wife was added to a paper being done by one of her peers (also a grad student) because she took over and ran some of the supporting experiments for him during a week he was preparing to move (he secured a job at NIST in Boulder after his graduation which was about to happen). So, yes, she did real, and hard work securing information for the paper, but wasn’t otherwise involved, and was added as an “also” author as a thank you.
Anecdotal, but shows there are a wide range of degrees of contribution that can be acknowledged depending on the goodwill (or lack thereof in some examples) of the main author(s).
The hopefully-forever-hypothetical problem is that your wife is on the hook if it turns out her peer falsified data or otherwise committed a professional breach of some kind in the paper. Every author is essentially signing off on the accuracy of the presented data.
A physician once offered to list me as an author on a paper because he was grateful for the help I’d given him. I was flattered but gave him an emphatic no. Beyond being inappropriate under the guidelines I linked to, I’m deeply unqualified to assess the science behind the manuscripts I helped with.
I am listed in the acknowledgements of a number of published papers and that is the appropriate place for me to be.
Even F.D.C Willard?
I’m used to seeing these laundry lists of authors (and no disparagement intended with that term) on papers that come out of the national labs. I’ve always assumed it was some sort of internal or even government policy. But am I wrong on that?
Well, like all things, we’re stuck with the “who do you trust” gotcha. She worked and studied with the person in question for four years, but as countless other examples of family and friends betraying you, such things are never impossible, though often unthinkable to the party injured.
And she did take the time to vet the section she reviewed and the conclusions drawn from the data she provided, but yes, can never know what’s going on with the rest. Which brings us back to the OP, in that what if any contribution and oversight do any of those co-authors actually have.
Watching my wife get her papers (sole author) peer-reviewed, as well as her attempt to replicate results from papers she had read that were pertinent to her dissertation made me realize that a LOT of stuff slips through the cracks. Especially the more esoteric the subject is. And that’s for my wife’s largely empirical, not theoretical studies!
To an extent its like the end-credits on movies - it captures the contributions of all people who got the end product together. Previous people have mentioned that it varies enormously across disciplines as to where this is captured. Increasingly the published paper is seen as the statement of the research, so it is appropriate that it is a complete record. If you are a junior scientist who worked for 5 years on a project and the paper from your lab is a major outcome of that time, it is fair you get your acknowledgement as a contributor.
Multi-authorship has taken over my field (archaeology) rapidly in the past decade. I suspect its because (a) editorship has moved from individual societies to publishing houses like Springer who try to apply consistent practice across fields and (b) with a decline in tenured positions, more work is grant-based and project-specific.
It also means editors looking at manuscripts of a single-person research article have to consider whether that can be as comprehensive, reliable and impactful as that produced by X people checking each other’s work.
As my son trudged his way up the doctoral candidate ladder, he was given more and more responsibility for larger parts of the project and moved higher up in the chain of co-authors, until finally he was responsible for the entire project to earn his PhD.
I should point out that even as a lowly first-year grad assistant, he was responsible for the daily care and feeding of the lab rats, which included recording weight, vital signs, and general health. In other words, he was collecting raw data and as such was certainly involved in the research.
First, let me mention that in mathematics, joint authors are always (well nearly always) listed alphabetically. Also large numbers of joint authors are unlikely. I have been on a number of 2 and 3 author papers, but nothing larger. I know of one 6 author paper; I don’t know how that happened.
I want to tell two anecdotes. One is very well known. Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. There is no question it was she. Her advisor told her to ignore these signals because they recurred every day at the same time and must be some terrestrial phenomenon. She noticed that they didn’t recur at the same time but rather every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds, the length of a sidereal day and therefore depended on the position of the earth in the universe. She went to her advisor with the information. According to (Sir Fred) Hoyle, from whom I heard the tale, the advisor would not permit her to publish a short claim, but took over the project and eventually published the paper with his name first, followed by a handfull of grad students who had all worked on it. Guess who got the Nobel prize? Hoyle happened to be visiting Montreal the day the prize was announced.
The other story involves a woman I knew well. She was a grad student in the lab I worked in when I was an undergrad. For whatever she was doing, she needed a refrigerated ultracentrifuge. There was not one in her lab. So she went to the head of another lab on campus that did have one and asked if she could use it. The head of that lab gave her permission, but added that any resultant paper must have his name on it–first. His name, no joke, was Mudd.
Given pressures in academia to publish research, it’s likely some degree of mutual back-scratching goes on when it comes to superfluous authorship..
FOZZIE: Nobody reads those names anyway, do they?
KERMIT: Sure. They all have families.
An example that came up in a Discord channel a while back mentioned that Justin Kruger of the famed “Dunning–Kruger effect” was just a graduate student at the time. Dunning made sure he got-co-authorship anyway in interests of giving Kruger credit to benefit his future career, which turned out to work nicely.
Particularly large collaborations (say, >200 people) will draft and ratify a set of bylaws that, among other things, handles authorship rules. Guiding principles might be that the conditions for authorship should be reasonably crisp; that over-inclusion is a lesser evil than over-exclusion; that there needs to be some definable contribution to the work; and/or that involvement should be either continuing or at least recent enough.
The last point is interesting since it involves drawing a practical line whereby a current student (say) contributing X amount to a very big project will be an author while a student from ten years ago that contributed a similar but still relevant amount – but who has since left the field for greener pastures – might not be an author. This feels in conflict when considering the level of contribution, but on the other hand, the current student is able to actually sign on with their approval of the results, whether implicitly or explicitly. Plus there’s the reality that the long-ago-departed collaborator probably doesn’t give a hoot either way (or at least won’t be materially affected by the choice.)
Folks in fields with these sorts of author lists know that the lists are highly “mechanical” and have no particularly useful information in them. In contrast (and as noted by posts upthread), different fields can have all sorts of information packed into the details of the sweated-over author list.