Talk:Academic authorship

This is good material, but I'm not sure this is the best place for it, and thought some discussion might help. Two concerns: first, in its current state this article seems to deal entirely with scientific publishing and has nothing to say about "academic" authorship more broadly. And second, perhaps this would work better as a section of academic publishing or scientific publishing? Is there really enough of a separate topic here for this to stand on its own as an article? -- Rbellin|Talk 18:48, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

I understand your concerns. Regarding the scope of the article, my personal knowledge limits what I can write about; there is no reason to think that the coverage won't be broaded by future contributors. I will attempt to shape the article so that it is clearer that what is currently written is not necessarily general to all academics. Regarding whether this topic is large enough to stand alone, I believe it is. I think it is already at the level of detail that if it were a section in another article, someone would suggest summarizing and moving the detail to a separate article. I'd prefer to give this article a chance; we could re-evaluate its state after a couple months and see if it is progressing towards becoming a good stand-alone article. ike9898 13:29, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

You're right, it's probably a good idea to leave the article here for a while and see if it grows. I am pretty sure that it will remain skewed toward scientific publication, simply because there's much more to say on the topic of authorship in fields where multiple coauthors are common. In most humanities fields and some social sciences, single authors on articles and books are the norm (and authorship simply means direct involvement in writing the piece), making most of the questions described in the article much simpler. -- Rbellin|Talk 14:12, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

After thinking about this a bit more, I'm inclined to favor (eventually) moving this article to scientific authorship and re-focusing it on scientific publication. I don't think there's any reason to pretend that this discussion applies across all disciplines, and most of these issues simply don't occur outside of the scientific disciplines in which multiple coauthorship is common. (It's still fine with me to wait a few weeks/months before making the move, but I don't think the article can be expanded to cover the humanities in a way that makes sense.) -- Rbellin|Talk 19:07, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

How about fields such as history? In an original research article, is it common to have multiple authors? ike9898 19:52, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Obviously my own experience is not universal, and when I have a moment I'll look for sources on the topic, but to my knowledge in many/most humanities fields co-authorship (a) is relatively uncommon and (b) basically always means that both authors (there are almost always only two) had a significant part in both the research and the writing of the piece. A more common form of collaboration is contribution to, or editing of, an anthology or collection on a shared topic, with each piece individually authored. -- Rbellin|Talk 20:25, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Possible light-hearted image

If you want to inject some relevant humor into the article, I suggest this comic. ^L_Wizard @ 16:22, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Sweet, but of course, it's copyrighted. ike9898 20:50, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Source for 'hundreds of authors' claim

I'd be interested to see a source (or examples) listed for the claim that "In genome sequencing and particle-physics collaborations, for example, a paper's author list can run into the hundreds." Orthabok 22:17, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I got that from the van Loon reference. ike9898 01:09, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

A practical example: selected PubMed example (Note: pseudo-randomly selected author) 217.122.83.79 11:22, 22 August 2007 (UTC)