The legendary Hungarian-born mathematician Erdős had more than 500 collaborators in his lifetime, for which the "Erdős" number was created to represent the distance between a mathematician and Erdős in the paper collaboration. However, this style-famous allusion is the product of a small science exclusively. In today's age of big science, a paper is written by hundreds of thousands of authors, most of whom do not know each other, and interesting things like this are meaningless because they are completely badly practiced.
Written by | Lu Changhai
Recently, I flipped through a miscellaneous book that has been idle for many years: A Random Walk in Science. This book is a collection of interesting, humorous, and even hilarious articles or article fragments about science, ranging from pages long to short.
One of the "three words" "spit" made me laugh.
The "spit" from the November 1964 issue of Physics Today was a "letter from a reader" aimed at a large cast of authors of high-energy physics papers, as follows:
The high-energy physicists have shown us a paper with more authors (27) than paragraphs (12). Can high-energy physics really be so different?
After more than half a century of re-reading this "spit", the author's question - "Can high-energy physics really be so different?" There is already a self-evident affirmative answer, and the only thing that can be corrected is that the word "alternative" has become obsolete. Because today, more than half a century later, papers with more authors than paragraphs are no longer "patents" for high-energy physics, and have become "new normal" rather than "alternative". As for the number of authors targeted by the "spit" of 27, it seems insignificant today — for example, in the field of gravitational wave astronomy that I have written about, there have been papers about 1,000 authors of black hole binary mergers (2016) and about 3,600 authors of neutron star binary mergers (2017).
What is the concept of about 3,600 authors? This article is not possible to reproduce the text due to length, but an interesting "miniature" picture (above) was made for a high-energy physics paper with about 3,500 authors, which can be used as a visual reference.
Such a large list of authors may have been unthinkable by the "complainers" of 1964, but it is still not the largest, because the number of authors of a high-energy physics paper published in the Physical Review Letters in 2015 reached an even more staggering 5,154, which attracted media attention for a while because of the large number of authors.
The so-called "frozen three feet, not a day's cold." This huge lineup of authors did not fall from the sky, but had a historical evolution, and the academic response to it also had an evolutionary process. The "spitting" quoted at the beginning of this article is an early example of such a reaction. After that, the reaction gradually changed from "complaining" to thinking. In 2001, Blaise Cronin, a professor of informatics at Indiana University, took his thinking to a systemic level and published a paper in The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.[Note 4] , reviewing the history of the act of "attribution" and proposing the concept of "hyperauthorship" to represent the phenomenon of large-scale attribution with more than 100 authors.
Cronin mentions that from 1981 to 1994, the number of "super-attributed" papers increased from 1 to 182.
Now, more than 20 years after Cronin's paper, the threshold of 100 authors set by Cronin has become low, but the concept of "super-signature" as the only "scientific name" for the phenomenon of large-scale signatures has been used. Following Cronin's paper, a new study published by the Scientific Watch website ScienceWatch.com in 2012 showed a new explosion in the number of "super-attributed" papers: more than 400 in 1998 and more than 1,000 in 2010. The number of papers, which is an order of magnitude above the "super-attribution" threshold— that is, the number of authors exceeding 1,000 — broke only occasionally before 2010, became 17 in 2010, and increased to 140 in 2011. In 2019, the journal Nature also published a study showing that the total number of papers with more than 1,000 authors in the five years from 2009 to 2013 was 573, and in the five years from 2014 to 2018, the number climbed to 1,315.
These studies show that "hyper-attribution" papers are not rare, and their existence is by no means accidental, but a systematic phenomenon that continues to grow. Why is this happening? One fundamental reason is the rise of so-called "Big Science"—that is, scientific research increasingly relies on technologically complex and massive devices. The rise of "big science" itself is not accidental, for example, the laws of quantum mechanics mean that large accelerators are used to detect small scales, the weak gravitational force means that large interferometers are used to detect gravitational waves, the existence of the Earth's atmosphere means that precision astronomical detection is to be carried out in outer space, and so on. All of this leads to "big science". Thus, in the field of physics, for example, the American physicist Steven Weinberg once summed up the emergence of "big science" this way: "The logic of discovery forced physics to become big" [Note 5].
The "big" of "big science" is all-round, and in addition to funds and equipment, the scale of personnel is also unprecedented, forming a number of extremely large communities. "Super-signature" reflects the latter. Still taking the field of physics as an example, according to statistics, the largest "super-signed" communities and approximate number of papers are:
1. μ Compact Muon Solenoid Detector (CMS): 4,000 people;
2. Superconducting Ring Field Detector (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) (ATLAS): 3,000 people;
3. Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC): 2,000 people;
A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE): 1,500 people;
5. Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE): 1,000 people;
6. LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC): 1,000 people.
Each of these communities is over 1,000 people in size, and most are still expanding (hence the "lower limit"). It is their existence that "super-attributed" papers that "guarantee" more than 1,000 authors are not rare, not accidental, but systematic, and will continue to grow.
On the other hand, although the size of the "super-signed" community is already so large, sometimes, even that size is not enough to "go it alone", but to cooperate with other "super-signed" communities. Once that happens, of course, the authors of the community merge. This merger has the potential to be a moment of "witnessing miracles", breaking – and even drastically breaking – the "world record" for the number of authors. This is the case, for example, of the 5,154 author paper mentioned above, which was the result of a collaboration between ATLAS and CMS and created a new "world record".
It is not difficult to predict from the reasons for the emergence of "super-signature" that such a "world record" is almost destined to be continuously broken.
Corresponding to the "big science" behind the "super-signature" is the previous "small science". Papers from the "little science" era don't have hundreds of authors, and there are no "world records" to speak of, but there is no shortage of attribution stories — and much more interesting ones. As a comparative review of the "small science" era of "attribution", let's introduce a story that involves a famous paper called the "alphaβγ" paper.
The so-called "αβγ" paper, its official title is "The Origin of Chemical Elements", published in 1948. That paper is an important paper in the history of cosmology, and is regarded by some physicists as one of the founding papers of the Big Bang cosmology, and one of the sources of cosmology's development in the direction of precision science. The authors of that paper were the Russian-American physicist George Gamow and his graduate student Ralph Alpher. Since the pronunciations of "Alpher" and "Gamow" were very close to the Greek letters "α" and "γ", the humorous Gamov decided to do some tricks on the signature, "unauthorized" adding Hans Bethe, a German-American physicist whose surname was pronounced very close to the Greek letter "β", to the author's ranks in order to form "αβγ".
The "Alphaβγ" paper is one of Gamov's countless jokes about the physics community and the world, and it is also a signed anecdote of the nostalgic era of "small science". Such anecdotes would not be found in a "hyper-attribution" paper. In the latter's "dark" lineup of authors, even if there are several people whose names can be put together into some kind of interesting combination, no one will care at all - and it is not worth caring at all, because it is the inevitable result of a large sample, and there is no interest at all. The ordinary authors in "super-signed" papers are almost "migrant workers" - all of them are gone, although it is not OK, but less or more than ten eights, or even dozens of hundreds, will not have a substantial impact on the paper.
The characteristics of this author of the "super-signature" paper, such as "migrant worker", are not only significantly different from the "small science" era, but also arouse some doubts. If the kind of "spitting" quoted at the beginning of this article still has a humorous meaning, then today, after more than half a century, the doubts about the "super-signature" paper have a certain seriousness. This is because there are some basic requirements for the attribution of papers, such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has defined the attribution of papers, requiring authors who sign papers to meet the following conditions [Note 7]:
Significant contribution to concepts or designs, or to the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; participated in the drafting of the paper or corrected the main content of the paper; made a final review of the published manuscript; and agreed to be responsible for all aspects of the research work.
It defines and emphasizes that the above conditions must be met at the same time. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) also defines the signatures of its journal papers in less detail but with similar themes, requiring that "attribution should be limited to people who have made significant contributions to research." Such basic requirements are easy to achieve in the era of "little science" and are not difficult to verify. In fact, even in the case of the "alpha βγ" paper, which joked about humor, Beta, who was "unauthorized" added to the ranks of authors, formally agreed to the signature after carefully reviewing the contents of the paper, and according to Gamov, Beta participated in the subsequent discussions, thus basically still meeting all of the above conditions. But in "hyper-attributed" papers, the number of authors is even more than the number of words in the paper (or the number of words Chinese), and a large proportion is "migrant worker", and it is almost impossible to make every author meet the above conditions.
Another feature of "hyper-attribution" is that because the author lineup is too large, even within a short period of time when the paper is drafted, sometimes a certain number of authors will die, so that the "framed" name, that is, the name of the deceased, which is usually only found in the list of authors or editorial boards of books or series with a long publication period, is not uncommon in "super-attributed" papers. For example, in a 2012 "hyper-attributed" paper that announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, there were 21 deceased people.
Although the appearance of "super-signature" papers has been less than half a century, compared with the history of scientific papers themselves, it has become a significant phenomenon in the fields of physics, astronomy, biology, medicine and other fields, and a number of other fields have also followed suit. This prominence is fuelled by the large number of authors who are much more likely to be cited—especially "self-cited"—than ordinary papers, and thus tend to rank among the best in the various rankings of papers that have always relied heavily on citations. In this trend, a rare "pure land" is mathematics - because mathematics requires much less money and relies on equipment, so at least so far there is no sign of "big science" following in the footsteps of [Note 9].
Before concluding this article, let's take an interesting thing in the "pure land" of mathematics to finally reflect the "super-signature".
Mathematicians may know a mathematician named Paul Erds, a mathematician known for his prolific and numerous collaborators who published more than 1,500 papers in his lifetime and co-published papers with more than 500 mathematicians, a legend of the "small science" era. In honor of Erdźh, and to highlight the large number of Erdsh collaborators, mathematicians created a concept: the Erd s number, which is used to represent the "distance" between a mathematician and Erdesh in a paper collaboration. Specifically, Erdőh himself has a 0, erdős number of mathematicians who have published papers with Erdish is 1, and the number of mathematicians who has not published papers with Erdish, but who has published papers with a mathematician with a mathematician with a 1 number of Erdşh, is 2, and so on. But in the "hyper-signature" paper, the number of "collaborators" (most of whom do not know each other at all) of any "migrant" author far exceeds the total number of collaborators of Erdish in his legendary lifetime, and interesting things like the creation of "Erdish numbers" become meaningless because of complete abuse.
The transition from "αβγ" to "hyper-signature" is a process of fading legends on a specific level. This fading is somewhat uncomfortable for people who have personally experienced the "little science" era. For example, the era of "small science" in the eyes of "β" (beta) in "αβγ" is like this: all discoveries are made with not too big and not too expensive equipment; physicists from all countries know each other; life in Copenhagen and Göttingen is idyllic and leisurely, but there are new discoveries almost every day... The "big science" era gave him the impression that with huge accelerators, each had a large group of scientists; the number of papers was so large that it was no longer possible to follow a small field; many times a year across the continents and oceans to participate in giant conferences that even friends could not find, but the pace of basic discoveries slowed down...
"How did everything change?" Bate sighed. I read Bate's exclamation itself, because his exclamation was published in 1958, and the mention of "huge accelerators", "a large group of scientists", "big Mac conferences" and so on is completely "small and big" compared to today's "big science"!
April 6, 2022
exegesis
1. The "complainer" is named Robert Myers, and the paper is F. Bulos et al, Total Cross Sections and Angular Distributions for π- + p η0 + n from Threshold to 1151 MeV, Phys. Rev. Lett. 13, 486 (1964)。
2. Although not important for this article, for the sake of completeness, let's list it: the paper is G. Aad. et al, Charged-particle multiplicities in pp interactions at sqrt(s) = 900 GeV measured with the ATLAS detector at the LHC, Phys. Lett. B 688, 21-42 (2010)。
3. Again, although not important for this article, let's list it: the paper is G. Aad. et al, Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 191803 (2015)。
4. 该论文为 B. Cronin, Hyperauthorship: A Postmodern Perversion of Evidence of a Structure Shift in Scholarly Communication Practices?, JASIST 52, 558-569 (2001)。
5. Being "forced" by the "logic of discovery" is the only way to go, so don't think of this article as a critique of "big science." And "big science" has its own excitement, which I've written about in a lot of other texts. This article is just a simple gossip about the "signature" part of the link - especially the "hyper-attribution" feature (although "coincidentally" is not a good point).
6. A careful reader may find that the combined number of ATLAS and CMS is significantly more than 5,154, so leave this simple question to ponder. :-)
7. Most of the material in this article comes from the field of physics, and the definition of the attribution condition should also be in the field of physics as an example, but I have tried to find several physics publications, but I have not seen a clear definition, so I can only take other fields as examples. Fortunately, those conditions (slightly simplified in expression) have little to do with the discipline, and most of them are common sense (physics journals are not clearly defined, probably because they are regarded as common sense), and they should not lose their representativeness.
8. The paper is for G. Aad. et al, Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC, Phys. Lett. B 716, 1-29 (2012)。 - This "G. Aad" has appeared three times in the notes of this article, and the blessing of alphabetical order is simply an eternal "first author" (and it can also be seen how "difficult" it is to be the first author in a "super-attributed" paper- in a paper mentioned in [Note 1] that has been "complained about" because of the number of authors, the first author's initial letter is only "B", whereas in today's "super-attributed" papers, not only the initial letter must be "A", but even the second letter must be "a").
9. Readers who are familiar with me may know that in most of my texts, when it comes to science, there is no strong distinction between mathematics and science. I made a brief explanation of this in the article "The Early History of the Three Problems of Ruler Drawing" [Note 1], which can be found in the article.
Special mention
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