Large-Team Science and Fair Individual Credit

High-energy physics, genomics and multinational clinical collaborations can publish very large-author papers. Other disciplines typically involve smaller teams or single authors. Counting every co-authored paper as identical individual effort ignores these structural differences.

Some bibliometric approaches divide credit among authors to reduce inflation, but equal fractions may not reflect actual labour. Author position also has different meanings between fields, so fractional counting should not be treated as a universal measurement of merit.

CRediT-style role descriptions can clarify activities such as conceptualisation, analysis, data curation or supervision. They may improve interpretation, yet remain unavailable or incomplete for many historical outputs.

Use team size, discipline and declared roles to interpret the record. Celebrate collaboration without equating membership of a large project with sole ownership of its entire output.