The number of authors whose names appear in the byline of scientific papers increased steadily during the second half of the 20th century. This increase occurred as a result of specialization, multidisciplinary collaboration, and the advent of large multicenter studies. However, authorship inflation has diluted the meaning of authorship. For example, which authors in a byline that contains more than 100 names can state that they actually wrote the paper or that they participated sufficiently to take public responsibility for the work? In response to this problem, suggestions were made in the 1980s and 1990s to limit the number of ...
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