What is hyperauthorship?

Hyperauthorship is a current phenomenon in academia where some journal papers have more than 50 authors. The word is coined by Blaise Cronin and described in his paper here.

A study conducted by Sciencewatch in 2012 revealed that there is an increase in the number of journal papers having more than 50 authors over the years.

Source: Sciencewatch
Just to give you an idea of hyperauthorship in academia, below is a few of the record-breaking journal papers in the number of authors.

This DNA sequence paper in Nature has over 100 authors.

Full title: The DNA sequence and biological annotation of human chromosome

Another fruit fly paper in g3journal has over 1000 authors.

Full title: Drosophila Muller F Elements Maintain a Distinct Set of Genomic Properties Over 40 Million Years of Evolution

The record-breaking paper?

This paper in High Energy Physics has more than 5,000 authors !!!

It is a scientific paper by research teams working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Full title: Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at s√=7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments

There is a post here by Hive account@lemouth if you would like to know more about Large Hadron Collider and the international collaborations at CERN.

P/S: Hive account@lemouth has provided some meaningful inputs on this post. See his comment below.

Why is hyperauthorship more prevalent now and is this healthy?

Author credit

We have seen hyperauthorship happening in physics and some fields of biology. Analysts have pointed hyperauthorship as a result of an increasingly interdisciplinary research and many more collaborations, and hence, more authors and researchers deserve to be given some credit. But some also questioned how to identify author contributions and scientific responsibility since there are way too many authors. Did the authors in fact, help in the research, analysis, giving views on the experimental results, or just plainly data collection? If many authors only contributed to data collection which is more or less seen as an operator's work scope, is it "fair" to other authors who have contributed novel ideas or writing? For example, in the fruit fly paper, 900 authors listed on the paper were actually undergraduates who helped to edit draft genome sequences as part of a training exercise. In short, there is a worry that hyperauthorship phenomenon can erode the value of being a scientific author.

Network effect

Perhaps a bigger issue at large is also a worry that authors are playing around with the impact of the journal papers to stretch their reach and eventually boosting paper citations. This is indeed a possibility since long authors lists can mean a network effect. This network effect is explored and analysed in a paper here and have seen some correlation between network effect of professors and citations. If this phenomenon becomes common place, it may make it harder for universities and funding agencies to assess individual researchers based on citations and journal paper impact factors. This can put young and junior professors, or single authors, or smaller research teams at a huge disadvantage. It has even been speculated that connections may matter a lot when it comes to research grants and funding.This may mean that connections are increasingly more important in academia than just pure and simple good research. "No man is an island" in academia can't get more true than this, and it is time for professors to turn to more networking.