Dividing up the credit
Lately, authors lists have been becoming incredibly long. Just a few days ago, when Nature Genetics put online their advanced publications (i.e. papers accepted, but not yet cleaned up and formatted for mass consumption), the shortest authors list was for ten authors. The longest, of course, had 68, and the average was 33 authors.
Admittedly, the problem is probably worse in genetics than other fields, because these days a lot of genetics requires massive amounts of work, from computational to experimental. Genetics used to require lots of work in the past, too, but publications back then tended to be on more tractable organisms, like bacteria or flies, where maybe one would have two or three authors. Nowadays, it’s not unusual to see massive experiments in mice, or even huge population studies in humans.
Still, I gotta wonder. These authors lists, even the super-long ones, weren’t organized alphabetically or anything. The order was definitely something someone thought about; so how do they get organized? What’s the difference in credit between the 20th and 21st author?
