How do physicists and astronomers team up to write research papers?

Busy busy today so just time to reblog this, an interesting article about the irresistible rise of the multi-author paper. What fraction of the “authors” actually play any role at all in writing these papers? Am I the only one that thinks this has very profound implications for the way we interpret bibliometric analyses?

Moonshot

The way in which physicists and astronomers team up to write technical papers has changed over the years, and not only is it interesting to look at this behavior for its own sake, but by analyzing the data it may be possible to better understand what role, if any, does the number of authors have on the scientific impact of a paper. Likewise, such an analysis can allow physics and astronomy journals to make decisions about their publishing policies.

I was curious about the trends in the number of authors per refereed astronomy paper, so I set out to write an R script that would read in data from the NASA Astrophysics Data System, an online database of both refereed and non-refereed academic papers in astronomy and physics. The script counts the monthly number of refereed astronomy and physics papers between January 1967 and September 2013, as well as…

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This entry was posted on October 16, 2013 at 9:30 am and is filed under Science Politics with tags astronomy, bibliometrics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “How do physicists and astronomers team up to write research papers?”

ian smail Says:
October 16, 2013 at 10:09 am

plotting the median number of authors might be more informative if this is driven by a tail of large-N papers (SDSS, WMAP and 2dFGRS are the obvious ones for providing multi-author beneficiaries, see top-cited in Google Scholar).

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John Peacock Says:
October 17, 2013 at 9:38 am

So how long before blogs are written by teams?

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- telescoper Says:
  October 17, 2013 at 9:48 am
  
  Some already are, e.g. Cosmic Variance.
  
  Reply
  - telescoper Says:
    October 17, 2013 at 10:24 am
    
    Sean Carroll provided most of the posts and I guess when he left it didn’t have enough momentum to keep going.
Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar Says:
November 2, 2013 at 5:24 am

You may like to read my article on “Making your research paper discoverable: Title plays the winning trick” available at

Making your research paper discoverable: Title plays the winning trick

—
Best wishes,
___________________________________________
Dr. M.Jagadesh Kumar, FNAE, FNASc, FIETE
NXP(Philips)Chair Professor
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi 110016
Email:mamidala@ee.iitd.ac.in
Home:http://web.iitd.ac.in/~mamidala
Blog:http://mamidala.wordpress.com

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