A medical research paper published in 1993 won the IgNobel prize
in literature for having 100 time as many authors as pages.
I pointed out to someone years ago that several papers coming out of high-energy physics institutions like FermiLab frequently had more lines of names than there were words in the title. The experiments are so huge, requiring the contributions of so many people (and you want to give full credit to everyone) that you end up with such Author List Bloat. It’s simply a fact of life in the pursuit of Big Physics. And, at the same time, there are plenty of low-tech and theoretical papers done on modest budgets with only one or two authors.
Then there are the cases where spurious authors get slipped in, especially when there are a lot of authors for a paper. There was the infamous case of a chemist who included his cat as a co-author (its cutesy name hidden by using his initial). Or the physics group I know of that invented an author whose name appeared on several papers. Or when real scientists who weren’t authors are recruited for the sake of a joke, as with the “Alpher, Bethe, Gamow” paper, or the “Knox, Knox, Whoose, Zair” paper. This class is worthy of a thread of its own.
I have a friend, a Biology PHD and former college department head who gave up academia for surfing five years ago. To make ends meet, he ghost writes scientific papers. The researchers just send him their research and conclusions and he writes the paper with minimal back and forth with the “author”. So, in many cases, “author” is a pretty loose descriptor, anyway.
When I was in grad school in CS the number of authors was pretty limited, and order was by contribution. I collaborated with someone pretty equally on a survey paper and a paper going into the top journal - we swapped first authorships. Our advisor was good about not being the first author for papers from his grad students.
My wife is a biologist and she said that if you’re in the elevator when the paper is being discussed you get to be an author.
Now once I dropped into an office where a few people were discussing an invention, and I suggested something fairly trivial, and got my name included on the patent. Since patent authors are in alphabetical order, I was first. On the other hand for a patent where I did 90% of the work, my co-inventor (who worked for me) who did 10% of the work was first because his name came first. We still got the same pittance from Bell Labs.
I want to mention that there is a possible downside to having your name on a paper that you didn’t have much to do with. If memory serves me, famous biochemist Joshua Lederburg had to resign the presidency of Rockefeller U. because a paper with his name on it turned out to have faked data or something like that. Even though he had nothing to do with the faking, he was tarred because his name was on the paper. The director of the lab I worked in when I was a student that I mentioned above was considered remarkable for the fact that if his name was on a paper, it was because he was involved in the research. This was considered odd in biochemistry. Another thing he did was put a machinist in the lab’s shop on a paper about the construction of a new lab instrument (a recording spectrophotometer, a common tool these days but invented in that lab around 1950).
I’m not sure what your point is.
Most papers on arxiv become published in journals.
And have a look at the number of authors on this paper.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07824-z
Lots of published papers have huge numbers of authors.
Having worked in one of these collaborations before, I’ve had my name on papers I haven’t read and had nothing to do with. It’s silly.
I do believe a lot of journals now draw distinctions between authors and collaboration groups or consortiums.
But of course there are infinite examples of papers with dozens of authors who have no business being there. That’s the whole point of the ICMJE standards and that’s why journals have begun requiring contribution statements.
As a historian, this thread confirms my analysis that history as a discipline is much, much harder than any science.
- there are all kinds of child/young adult prodigies in many sciences. There are no history prodigies. Therefore, while any child can do math, etc., history is the preserve of mature, developed minds.
- History is not written by teams listing pages of collaborators on their final product. Therefore, the work of any single scientist is simple and minuscule compared to the magisterial work of the historian.
- Cue old-time movie trailer basso profundo voice: “One lone historian, lost in time, in a world gone amok…”
Okay, I’m going back to marking papers and cross-multiplying and dividing to determine grades and percents.
Decades ago, I was named on a paper because I was the one shoveling the dairy manure.
I also fed the digester, took samples, and did lab tests on the samples. But the shoveling was the thing that no one else wanted to do. I was also the one with forklift safety certification.
Other people did the analysis of the test results.
Sir Cyril Burt’s research papers on the heritable nature of intelligence raised doubts in part because nobody could remember the researchers he credited as coauthors, and there was no trace of them in university records.
Were you the first author?
In some research papers, everyone involved is shoveling dairy manure. 
Wouldn’t Ylaria be #2?
I think it’s time to moove this conversation forward lest the BS get piled higher and deeper. 
What do you mean by “on the hook”? If one of my coauthors screws up to the point where it’s necessary, we issue a correction or a retraction and move on.
I believe I was last. I was surprised to be on it at all, actually. I was an undergraduate doing the job for the money.
Ah, so you were the corresponding author credited with leading the work!
They don’t equate a PhD to Piled Higher and Deeper for nothing. 
I got named twice- once for taking care of the lab animals, and another for doing some field research. I mean, those had to be done, so- why not? I mean no pay, nothing else, why
they throw your name in at the end?
I guess it was a reward for doing nasty unpaid volunteer tasks.