I was looking at the latest issue of Cell and marvelling at how many authors there are on each paper. It’s no secret that the raison d’être of Cell is to publish the “last word” on a topic (although whether it fulfils that objective is debatable). Definitive work needs to be comprehensive. So it follows that this means lots of techniques and ergo lots of authors. This means it is even more impressive when a dual author paper turns up in the table of contents for Cell. Anyway, I got to thinking: has it always been the case that Cell papers have lots of authors and if not, when did that change?
I downloaded the data for all articles published by Cell (and for comparison, J Cell Biol) from Scopus. The records required a bit of cleaning. For example, SnapShot papers needed to be removed and also the odd obituary etc. had been misclassified as an article. These could be quickly removed. I then went back through and filtered out ‘articles’ that were less than three pages as I think it is not possible for a paper to be two pages or fewer in length. The data could be loaded into IgorPro and boxplots generated per year to show how author number varied over time. Reviews that are misclassified as Articles will still be in the dataset, but I figured these would be minimal.
First off: Yes, there are more authors on average for a Cell paper versus a J Cell Biol paper. What is interesting is that both journals had similar numbers of authors when Cell was born (1974) and they crept up together until the early 2000s, when the number of Cell authors kept increasing, or JCell Biol flattened off, whichever way you look at it.
I think the overall trend to more authors is because understanding biology has increasingly required multiple approaches and the bar for evidence seems to be getting higher over time. The initial creep to more authors (1974-2000) might be due to a cultural change where people (technicians/students/women) began to get proper credit for their contributions. However, this doesn’t explain the divergence between J Cell Biol and Cell in recent years. One possibility is Cell takes more non-cell biology papers and that these papers necessarily have more authors. For example, the polar bear genome was published in Cell (29 authors), and this sort of paper would not appear in J Cell Biol. Another possibility is that J Cell Biol has a shorter and stricter revision procedure, which means that multiple rounds of revision, collecting new techniques and new authors is more limited than it is at Cell. Any other ideas?
I also quickly checked whether more authors means more citations, but found no evidence for such a relationship. For papers published in the years 2000-2004, the median citation number for papers with 1-10 authors was pretty constant for J Cell Biol. For Cell, these data mere more noisy. Three-author papers tended to be cited a bit more than those with two authors, but then four author papers were also lower.
The number of authors on papers from our lab ranges from 2-9 and median is 3.5. This would put an average paper from our lab in the bottom quartile for JCB and in the lower 10% for Cell in 2013. Ironically, our 9 author paper (an outlier) was published in J Cell Biol. Maybe we need to get more authors on our papers before we can start troubling Cell with our manuscripts…
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The Post title is taken from ‘All This and More’ by The Wedding Present from their LP George Best.