Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinnk | Hacker News Reader

This one [0] about the Higgs boson is hard to beat. Pages 25-32 are just full of around 5150 „authors“, pages 33-37 are their affilliations.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214

View on HN

Even without that particularly special case, high-energy physics collaborations have long since broken the idea of authors. There are now many collaborations with hundreds of authors publishing regularly and quite a few that are into the thousands.

I like it, represents science's general 'standing on the shoulders of our precedents' far more realistic then the 'genius solo' PR mythos.

Where is the balance between this and citations? Authors implies said person provided additions to get the work done.

With projects like the LHC, there really are thousands of people involved in "getting the work done."

Can you cite the paper with that?

https://www.science.org/content/article/physics-paper-sets-r...

After parsing that article to get the paper link, that is insane. I am not in the field, but find it curious that each every person of that list of authors had direct significant contribution. Not my field though so just seems odd.

The LHC is a massive experiment. Just to cite Wikipedia:

> The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

They give credit to everyone who built the instrument, wrote the software pipelines to analyze the data, etc. That's thousands of people. That's how large experimental projects work.

I think the number is ~2930 authors according to the CDS [1] which is comparable to the corresponding CMS paper which has about ~2900 authors [2]

[1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/1471031

[2] https://impact.ornl.gov/en/publications/observation-of-a-new...

That, is crazy to me, but different areas and all that I suppose.

That, is just bonkers to me. Different fields and everything, but that sounds like a whole company authored the paper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com