'What's an author?' asks Robin Rose of Oregon State University on Nautilus (http://tinyurl.com/34qvmo). Commenting on a Nature paper with 21 authors, he lists ten questions that address the validity of authorship. Nature journals do not specify a particular order or maximum number of authors, but we do strongly encourage the inclusion of a statement on the actual contribution of each co-author.

In a lively response to Rose's post, Antoine Blanchard cites strategies developed by high-energy physicists to deal with 'hyperauthorship'. John Quackenbush points to the realities of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations to achieve something that could not be done alone. “We should stop worrying about who did what and instead ask how the work advances the field. This is science after all, not accounting.”

Similarly, Steven Salzberg writes: “The malaria genome paper (M. J. Gardner et al. Nature 419, 498–511; 2002) had nearly 50 authors. That was the culmination of a 6-year effort by an international consortium, and everyone on the author list (including me) spent years on some aspect of the project.”