A physics paper with 5,154 authors is the newest reached pinnacle in people’s drive to divide and concur, when there’s credit to be had. Those 5,154 physicists stand a-write on the collective shoulders of the 976 physicians who shared the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for literature. That 1993 Ig Nobel prize was awarded to Eric Topol [pictured here], R. Califf, F. Van […]
Tag: co-authors
Wong and Wright, hundreds of times
This is one of the many hundreds of academic papers that have a co-author who is Wong and a co-author who is Wright: “Trefoil peptides,” W.M. Wong, R. Poulsom, and N.A. Wright, Gut, vol. 44, no. 6 (1999): 890-895. (Thank you to investigator Matthew R. Francis for bringing the phenomenon to our attention.) This particular […]
The lead author (of 976 co-authors) is not an author?
We received a strange direct message (on Twitter) from Dr. Eric Topol [pictured here], who—to all appearances—was lead author on a study that lists (approximately) 976 co-authors. Dr. Topol sent the message specifically to say that he is not a co-author of that study. The study is: “An international randomized trial comparing four thrombolytic strategies for […]
Another cornucopia of co-authors
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 […]
Ever more co-authors: Nature’s bounty
The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Eric Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages. That study was in The New England Journal of Medicine,] Now, seventeen years later, […]
How many wronged or wrong co-authors
A quick math adventure: Estimate the number of co-authors in this publication (“Erratum to ‘Atmospheric effects on extensive air showers observed with the surface detector of the Pierre Auger observatory‘”, Astroparticle Physics, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 89–99. Thanks to investigator Adrian Smith for bringing it to our attention.) If you want to do […]