It seems so innocent. The list begins “Khachatryan V, Sirunyan AM, Tumasyan A, Adam W, Bergauer T, Dragicevic M, Erö J,…” These are the first few co-authors of a paper called “Search for Stopped Gluinos in pp Collisions at sqrt[s]=7 TeV.”And then the list goes on, and on, and on… with about 2100 co-authors total.
And then it turns out that there are several such multi-multi-co-authored papers. Take a look.
They owe a spiritual debt, at least, to the approximately 976 co-authors of a single medical report who shared the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for publishing a paper that has 100 times more authors as pages. And do not forget the later gang of more than 2500 co-authors [which we celebrated not so long ago] and the gang that has approximately 57,000….
(Thanks to Ed Yong for bringing this new batch to our attention.)