【经济学人】仓鼠也能当作者？| 2016.11.26 | 总第747期

ONE thing that determines how quickly a researcher climbs the academic ladder is his publication record. The quality of this clearly matters—but so does its quantity. A long list of papers attached to a job application tends to impress appointment committees, and the resulting pressure to churn out a steady stream of articles in peer-reviewed journals often leads to the splitting of results from a single study into several “minimum publishable units”, to the unnecessary duplication of studies and to the favouring of work that is scientifically trivial but easy to publish.

决定研究员学术水平攀升速度的是出版记录，当然，研究员的出版报刊不能仅仅在乎质量，也同样要在乎数量。关于工作申请的文章作者名字很多，给委员会留下了深刻的印象，对于写出一定量用于在同行审查期刊上发表的文章这件事，给研究员带来了压力，这经常导致他们做一次关于几个“最小出版单位”的研究就快速得出结果，造成了没有必要反复研究和只图工作的状况，虽然所写文章不大合乎科学，却容易出版。

There is another way to pad publication lists: co-authoring. Say you write one paper a year. If you team up with a colleague doing similar work and write two half-papers instead, both parties end up with their names on twice as many papers, but with no increase in workload. Find a third researcher to join in and you can get your name on three papers a year. And so on.

填满出版物目录的另一种方法：共同执笔人。举例来说，你一年写了一篇文章，如果你和你的同事合作做同类工作，每人只写了两个半篇论文，但是每个团队署名的数目却能是自己写的论文的两倍，并且工作量没有增加。如果有第三个研究员加入，那么你就能在一年所发表的三篇论文上都写上你的名字，当然，还有很多方法能达到同样的效果。

To investigate the matter, The Economist reviewed data on more than 34m research papers published between 1996 and 2015 in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. These were drawn from Scopus, the world’s biggest catalogue of abstracts and citations of papers, which is owned by RELX Group, a publisher and information company.

为了研究这个现象，《经济学人》团队在同行审查期刊以及会议活动中重新审查了在1996年和2015年间超过三千四百万份出版的研究报。这些信息是由出版商和信息公司励讯集团旗下的-全球最大文摘及索引目录-Scopus数据库提供。

• RELX Group：励讯集团

Over the period in question, the average number of authors per paper grew from 3.2 to 4.4. At the same time, the number of papers divided by the number of authors who published in a given year (essentially, the average author’s overall paper-writing contribution) fell from 0.64 to 0.51. The boom in co-authorship more than compensated for the drop in individual productivity, so that the average researcher notched up a slightly higher number of papers for his curriculum vitae: 2.3 a year compared to 2.1 two decades earlier.

在此期间，每篇文章作者平均数由3.2涨到4.4。同时，在特定的某一年，由论文的数量除以出版论文作者的数量得出的结果（从本质上来说，也就是作者的总文章贡献数）从0.64降到0.51。共同执笔的方式被广泛使用，补足了微薄的个人生产率，以至于一般来说，研究员个人简历上描述的文章发表数稍微多一些：和早先二十年前的2.1相比，涨到了2.3。

One particular trend behind these numbers is the rise of “guest authorship”, in which a luminary, such as the director of a research centre, is tagged on as an author simply as a nod to his position or in the hope that this signals a study of high quality. That can lead to some researchers becoming improbably prolific. For example, between 2013 and 2015 the 100 most published authors in physics and astronomy from American research centres had an average of 311 papers each to their names. The corresponding figure for medicine, though lower, was still 180. Figures for British universities are more modest but similarly striking. The top century of physicists and astronomers averaged 280 papers each; the top century of doctors, 139 papers. Indeed, it is so easy to add a co-author that some have honoured their pets. Sir Andre Geim, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, listed H.A.M.S. ter Tisha as co-author of a paper he published in 2001 in Physica B, a peer-reviewed journal.

“荣誉作者”（也就是杰出人物，比如研究中心的主任被贴上作者的标签以肯定他的身份，希望这标志着高质量的研究）的数量呈增加趋势。这让一些研究员论文成果不可思议地多。例如，在2013年到2015年之间，美国研究中心的100个出版率最高的物理天文作者，平均每个作者就有311篇论文。医药方面的作者尽管少，却也有180个。英国大学的数据平稳，但同样引人注目。在物理、天文领域发展的巅峰时期，物理学家和天文学家平均每人280篇文章;在医学发展的巅峰时期，医生平均每人139篇文章。甚至，一些学者把自己的宠物列入共同作者的名单，这对于他们来说是增加共同作者数目的简单方法。安德烈•海姆爵士于2010年获得了诺贝尔物理学奖，他曾把他的仓鼠 H.A.M.S. ter Tisha列为他在2001年于《物理期刊B》这本同行审查日志上出版文章的共同作者。

Sir Andre Geim

Another trend is that the meaning of authorship in massive science projects is getting fuzzier. Particle physics and genomics, both of which often involve huge transnational teams, are particularly guilty here. A paper on the Higgs boson published in 2015 in Physical Review Letters holds the record, with 5,154 co-authors (listed on 24 of the paper’s 33 pages). It reported on the mass of the boson, a fundamental particle studied in experiments conducted in the giant—and heavily staffed—Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. A genomics paper on Drosophila, a much-studied fruitfly, also published in 2015, has 1,014 authors, most of them students who helped with various coding tasks. Such studies are paragons of scientific collaboration and the exact opposite of creating minimum publishable units. But they list as authors people who have contributed only marginally to the success of the project—roles that, in the past, were simply acknowledged in a thanks-to-all sentence but are now the bricks from which careers may be built.

另外，大众科学项目中的作者身份意义越来越模糊。粒子物理学和基因组学都由跨国团队研究，这也是作者数目之多的缘由。2015年，于《物理评论快报》发表的关于希格斯玻色子的文章，创造了有5154个共同作者（这篇33页的文章中有24页是作者署名）的记录。该文章表示，通过邻近日内瓦的大型强子对撞机对基本粒子的研究，发现了大量玻色子。关于多人研究果蝇基因组的文章也于2015年出版，该文章有1014个作者，其中大多数是帮助完成编码任务的学生。这种研究是科学合作和没有创造最小出版单位的模范。期待您的翻译，您可以将翻译留言到文章底部，第二天会有详细解析哦。

• Higgs boson：希格斯玻色子

• Large Hadron Collider：强子对撞机

• Drosophila：果蝇

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