A physics paper with 5,154 authors

Only the first nine pages in the 33-page article describe the research itself, including references.

May 21, 2015 01:40 am | Updated 01:40 am IST

A physics paper with 5,154 authors has as far as anyone knows broken the record for the largest number of contributors to a single research article.

Only the first nine pages in the 33-page article, published on May 24 in Physical Review Letters , describe the research itself including references. The other 24 pages list the authors and their institutions.

The article is the first joint paper from the two teams that operate ATLAS and CMS, two massive detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europes particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. Each team is a sprawling collaboration involving researchers from dozens of institutions and countries.

By pooling their data, the two groups were able to obtain the most precise estimate yet of the mass of the Higgs boson.

Robert Garisto, an editor of Physical Review Letters , says that publishing the paper presented challenges above and beyond the already Sisyphean task of dealing with teams that have thousands of members. The biggest problem was merging the author lists from two collaborations with their own slightly different styles, Mr. Garisto says. I was impressed at how well the pair of huge collaborations worked together in responding to referee and editorial comments, he adds.

Too big to print? Every author name will also appear in the print version of the Physical Review Letters paper, says Mr. Garisto. By contrast, the 2,700-odd author list for a Nature paper on rare particle decays that was published on May 15 will not appear in the June print version, but will only be available online.

— New York Times News Service

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