Most of it's boring

Academic flash mob

An internet search for rare cancers using the world's favourite, or at least most used, search engine brought an odd-sounding article to my attention: An atypical case of histiocytic sarcoma in a Wistar rat (Rattus norvegicus). Hmm. What does atypical mean in this context?

I wish I could tell you, but I have no idea. I didn't read the whole article because its pay-per-view, but I did read the first page. And what surprised me was that this paper, reporting findings from a single rat, had no less than eight authors!

Eight fucking authors and one fucking rat! What the hell did they do, carve the bloody thing?

Whatever, it sent me down a rabbit hole of authorship padding and circle-jerking. I recalled a furore many years ago when two physics papers were published, one with 197 authors and the other with 198. There were calls at the time to stop the practice of what seemed to be nothing more than mutual back-rubbing and publication-padding co-authorship deals. So that has to be the nadir, right?

Wrong.

In fact, it's got so out of hand since then that there's even a term for papers with 500+ authors: mega-author titles. Over 5,000 such titles have been recently identified (Dotson, 2024). A record for the most authors on a single paper was set around ten years ago, when a paper published on work at the large hadron collider included 5,154 names (Castelvecchi, 2015). COVID-19 kicked that into a cocked hat though, the current Guiness World Record for most authors on a single peer-reviewed academic paper is from COVIDSurg Collaborative and GlobalSurg Collaborative with a wholly unbelievable 15,025 names associated with it (Dotson, 2024). eek

Fortunately, one doesn't have to name all 15,025 authors when citing their work. phew

Eight authors and one rat, the principal contributor who probably didn't even merit a namecheck in the acknowledgements, seems quite restrained in comparison. So, step forward Anne-Laure Bauchet, Marie-Claude Fouque, Sara Belluco, Sophie Château-Joubert, Laetitia Elies, Pierre Maliver, Frédéric Schorsch, and Jean-Jacques Fontaine. Everyone gets a fucking participation medal. slowhandclap


  • Bauchat, A.L., Fouque, M.C., Belluco, S., Château-Joubert, S., Elies, L., Maliver, P., Schorsch, F., Fontaine, J.J. (2008). An atypical case of histiocytic sarcoma in a Wistar rat (Rattus norvegicus). Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology 59 385–390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.etp.2007.11.014
  • Castelvecchi, D. (2015). Physics paper sets record with more than 5,000 authors. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.17567
  • COVIDSurg Collaborative, GlobalSurg Collaborative (2021). Timing of surgery following SARS-CoV-2 infection: an international prospective cohort study. Anaesthesia 76 748–758. https://doi.org/10.1111/anae.15458
  • Dotson, D.S. (2024). Mega-authorship implications: How many scientists can fit into one cell? Accountability in Research 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2318790