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I am a microbiologist and molecular biologist turned tenured biotech faculty turned bioinformatics scientist turned entrepreneur. My passion is developing instructional materials for 21st century biology (Geospiza Education).
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Category: Humor
Posted on: August 8, 2007 6:34 PM, by Sandra Porter
Biologist 1: How many physicists does it take to write a research paper?
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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Comments
If the above cite is the norm, then they do it alphabetically.
Posted by: Algerine | August 8, 2007 7:22 PM
This list is definitely alphabetical. I just don't know if that's the norm or an anomaly.
Posted by: Sandra Porter | August 8, 2007 8:31 PM
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.
Posted by: Chad Orzel | August 8, 2007 10:06 PM
Thanks Chad! It's great to hear the story from an expert!
Posted by: Sandra Porter | August 8, 2007 11:29 PM
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
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | August 9, 2007 12:26 AM
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
Posted by: G. Shelley | August 9, 2007 7:01 AM
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.
Posted by: Farhat | August 9, 2007 7:54 AM
"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?
Posted by: Barry | August 9, 2007 10:36 AM