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Certain classes of papers in our trade have a lot of coauthors. Indeed, the average number of coauthors on papers indexed in PubMed has risen from 1.5 to 5 over the last sixty years. No surprise, really, given the nature of research that is being carried out today, where one or two people can not hope to have all the skill sets necessary to bring a piece of research to completion, nor to run the sequencers in a genome project (for example).

So we might expect to see papers carrying the names of a couple of dozen, if not a couple of hundred, contributors (whether they all should be in the list is another matter) on papers arising from sequencing projects or clinical trials and the like.

But anything biology (or medicine) can do, physics can do better. This morning I was searching for a particular author, with a reasonably common surname and first initial, on PubMed. I stumbled across a paper in Physical Review Letters, with the title of Search for a Heavy Particle Decaying into an Electron and a Muon with the ATLAS Detector in √s=7  TeV pp collisions at the LHC. The paper is full of the language you might expect from such a snappy title, such as

The eµ candidate events are required to have exactly one electron and one muon with opposite charge satisfying the above selection criteria. Furthermore, events have to contain at least one primary vertex reconstructed with more than four associated tracks with p_T > 150 MeV.

And it has, count them, 3044 authors. Three thousand and forty four.

How’s that for stamp collecting?