Motivation As the major currency in the scientific reputation economy, the analysis of article publishing reveals different disciplinary cultures and working styles.

Methodology We conducted an Advanced search in Scopus – a bibliographic data base with more than 22.000 peer-reviewed journals (Scopus, 2017) – between 27th of February and 7th of March 2017.

Description The number of authors per article in the subject area Physics and Astronomy is 1268 on average with a maximum of 5154 authors in one paper (ATLAS Collaboration et al., 2015). The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 58 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis ( n = 2135) were cited 27 times on average.

Today, GigaScience launched a project providing an alternative way to give authors credit for their work, contributing more to collaboration, transparency and better data. Amye Kenall tells us more about what this is and how it works. There is a clear need for better transparency and credit around authorship. In the current system researchers are evaluated by publications and the Impact Factor of journals in which they appear.

Inspired by the forthcoming Hack4Knowledge I've put together a service that enables you to assert that you are the author of a paper using the Mendeley API.If you are impatient, give it a try at: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/hack4knowledge/iwrotethat/To use it you need a Mendeley account. When you go to I wrote that you will be asked to connect to your Mendeley account.