Rise of

the Coauthor

(a very meta journal-club)

Travis Hoppe & Dan Appella

github.com/thoppe/Rise-of-the-Coauthor

Motivation:
Author count histogram for a single issue of JBC

Editorial

Purpose of this talk is to examine the trends of

journal article authorship

and other interesting facts from the front-end of a journal.

Methods

JCI (J. Clinical Investigations), PNAS (Proc. National Academy of Sciences), JACS (J. American Chemical Society), JBC (J .Biological Chemistry), Science, Nature, Cell.

For each journal, every table of contents was downloaded,
this gave title and authorship information for each paper.

Filtered for editorials, corrections, errata, book reviews, ...
Approximately 2.4K TOC and 655K papers.

Limitations

Why not examine the abstracts, or the articles themselves?

Time/complexity issues

Legal issues (c.f. Aaron Swartz)

Publicly available data

Consortia

LARGE project collaborations, removed from study.

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

A Particle Consistent with the Higgs Boson Observed with the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider

Characterization of the Martian Surface Deposits by the Mars Pathfinder Rover, Sojourner

Authorship distribution

In most cases the distribution of authorship follows a Poisson;
the mean is approximately the variance.

Extrapolate?

Assume a linear trend from last 15 years

Correlated to growth?

Bibliographics via Thomson-Reuters

Common metrics for scientific impact:

Total citations
Impact factor / Article influence
Eigenfactor (similar to Google's page-rank)

Single Authorship

a priori not the same trend as mean authorship...

Lexicographical analysis

Look for significant keywords in the titles

Remove stop words:

e.g. [the,first,has]

Apply stemming, lemmatization:

(acids, acidic) acid

Identify a canonical representative set for related words

Top keywords in an era

NATURE 1935

spectrum        4.24
structure       3.15
neutron         3.01
radioactivity   2.74

NATURE 1951

acid            7.32
chromatography  2.76
structure       2.68
cell            2.20

NATURE 2013

cell            12.59
structure       5.87
protein         5.13
human           5.01

Title length

Number of significant words in the title, some are quite verbose.

.alpha.- and .beta.-Carboxylic groups as primary ligating groups in promoting amide deprotonation. Solid-state behavior of N-tosylalaninate-copper(II) complexes: crystal and molecular structures of bis(N-tosyl-.beta.-alaninato) bis(imidazole)copper(II), polymeric (N-tosyl-.alpha.-alaninato) diaquacopper(II) monohydrate, and dipiperidinium bis(N-tosyl-.alpha.-alaninato) cuprate(II) monohydrate complexes

Prospective study of cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses to influenza and antibodies to human T lymphotropic virus-III in homosexual men. Selective loss of an influenza-specific, human leukocyte antigen-restricted cytotoxic T lymphocyte response in human T lymphotropic virus-III positive individuals with symptoms of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and in a patient with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

Verbosity Saturates

Is science really changing?

YES!

Some metrics: science budgets, big data, nationalities of postdoctoral students, number of international collaborations, ...

NIH Funding

Growth of Data

International growth