Abstract

Big science is on the rise. Recent endeavors, such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project, illustrate the rise in large-scale scientific inquiries. To assess whether big science is part of a general trend towards increased authorship, we queried the publicly available database Pubmed and measured the trend in number of authors per paper over the last century. Here we show that authorship has increased five-fold since 1913 and predict that by 2034, publications will boast an average of 8 authors.