Is mass authorship destroying the credibility of papers?

The implications of the growing phenomenon of hyperauthorship can be serious. Apart from problems related to recognizing the contribution each author has made to a study, the quality of data and trustworthiness of the research design could become questionable. Indeed, collaborative research is the way forward, but a serious thought needs to be spared toward determining whether hyperauthorship is contributing to scientific progress.

I have just finished writing two articles about mass authorship. These two articles develop a methodological framework for a new publication approach called 'Crowd-Authoring'. The first article is entitled 'International Assemblies of Authoring: The Art and Politics of Engaging 101 Authors of Educational Technology'. The second is 'Crowd-Authoring: A Developmental Project on the Scholarship of Educational Technology'. These two articles are under review and not out yet, but can be found in my blog: https://crowdauthoring.wordpress.com/

Authoring is very different in different sub-fields of science. In biology for instance, the last-author position is a very prestigious one, while it is not in other fields. In particle physics, detectors have to be conceived, built, calibrated and then data recorded, processed, analysed, compared to ran simulations, etc. All these steps cannot be done by a single person. Giving credit only to the scientists who focus on the very last steps (analysing data and writing) would be detrimental to those more involved in earlier steps. It would provide dangerous incentives, every one being pushed away from work useful to the whole community. Hence the decision to name everyone involved in the collaboration on every article. This decision implies that articles are not sent to publishers before an internal review committee tries to find every possible mistake and weakness in the paper. Such internal referees are rarely met in other fields. Alphabetical order avoids endless discussion on the respective merits of different steps of the research. Non-particle physicists often wonder how such a system can work when hiring or promotion decisions has to be taken. Here's the secret: hiring committees don't look at publication lists (everyone has the same) but at conference lists. Because a talk can be given by a single person only, representing the whole community. Hence conference attendance is decided at the community level: if 30 abstracts have been accepted at very prestigious conference A and 20 at less prestigious conference B, the community (called "the experiment" or "the collaboration") decides who, among the 1000s researchers, goes where to present collective results. Therefore, participating to prestigious conferences is a sign of scientific recognition from your experiment.