And we thought publishing was complicated in biology

Biologist 1: How many physicists does it take to write a research paper?

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Biologist 2 (looks at the citation above): "all of them?"

I wrote about the challenges that biologists and computer scientists have in deciding who's on first. But after finding some physics papers in PubMed by mistake, I've decided that it must be much harder for the physicists.

How do the physicists decide which author goes where?

Do they all have to write out their individual contributions?

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If the above cite is the norm, then they do it alphabetically.

Alphabetical is more or less the norm for large collaborations, although the first author may sometimes be out of alphabetical order, and reflect who did the most work.

Collaborations of that size are mostly restricted to high-energy physics. Those of us who do low-energy work write papers with single-digit numbers of authors, the same as everybody else.

Now think about the page of recognitions, if they list everyone involved in building the experiment (often a huge accelerator and correspondingly huge detector). :-P

By Torbjörn Larsson, OM (not verified) on 08 Aug 2007 #permalink

I suppose that in biology, a lot of the various sequencing projects, that are fat to big for any one lab, could have that sort of author list, though I don't recall if they did

By G. Shelley (not verified) on 09 Aug 2007 #permalink

That's actually kind of a small number of authors for a typical High Energy Experimental paper. The largest number of authors ever on a single paper was 1681. Many typically range between 200-500 authors.

"Collaborations of that size are mostly restricted to high-energy physics. Those of us who do low-energy work write papers with single-digit numbers of authors, the same as everybody else."

Posted by: Chad Orzel

So, if you get more physicists together, the energy goes up? Or do higher energy levels draw in more physicists?