Previous surveys have focused on one field or just a few, and they have looked at a limited range of contributions, says John Walsh, a sociologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The authors of the latest study “really get down to serious detail”, he says.

Walsh notes that there are no recognized authorship standards across all scientific disciplines: different fields have different norms. For instance, in some subfields of physics, it has become common to have thousands of authors on a research paper. But in biology, author lists tend to be much shorter, Walsh says. 

For the full article, visit the Nature website.