Is there a question that lurks in the back of the mind of a thoughtful peer-reviewed journal reader's mind regarding, say, a 40 authored paper? . . . What percent of what part of the paper submitted to a peer-reviewed medical journal did each author contribute as part of the authorship of that peer-reviewed journal submitted for consideration of publication?
Many journals now ask authors of multi-author manuscripts to state explicitly what the contribution of each author actually was. And as authorship is not only writing, this might include those who designed, conducted and analysed the study and then commented on the draft manuscript without doing any actual writing. But this isn't a problem to my mind.
As of May 2015 the record for number of coauthors (5,154) was a physics paper: https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-more-than-5-000-authors-1.17567
Except for a few big names and some section heads, attribution of individual contributions that might be divined from the manifest content of the article has become meaningless. It's like film credits nowadays, which include coffee gofers and cleanup crew. Maybe in the future coauthors will have a hyperlink to an extended description of their particular input....
Hyperlinking between named author's name and paper contribution is an excellent idea.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Cognitive Science
- Thinking