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Most of us have spent time compiling reference lists for papers or longer documents, a task which used to be even more time-consuming before the Internet and TeX came along (all lists had to be typed and sometimes retyped). With increased international communication as well as pressure by funding agencies to do collaborative work, more multi-author papers are apparently being written now. For instance, recent VIGRE-supported algebra groups at the University of Georgia have been publishing papers with many authors. This morning's automatic mailing from arXiv (in subject areas of special interest to me, mostly close to math.RT) brought a prize-winner: 1009.4134. Are we looking at the future?

It's the result of an AIM conference, perhaps intended for formal publication but challenging in any event to those who might want to refer to it. Page 23 of the paper itself consists mostly of an author listing. Since the list of 28 authors goes from A to Z (Aguiar to Zabrocki), it would seem invidious to refer only to Aguiar et al. Of course, if electronic-only publishing ever becomes the universal rule in mathematics, placing a link like the one I just posted in a numbered reference list might be enough. (Provided the link is durable.)

Is there a reasonable way to refer to a 23 page article with 28 authors?

P.S. I'm not planning to cite this particular paper, but am in the process of assembling a reference list for other purposes and might also need to cite Georgia VIGRE group papers at some point. It's usually impossible in an alphabetical list of authors to identify the "leaders" or the people contributing the main ideas. Theoretical progress does require ideas, whereas experimental work often depends more heavily on organization, teamwork, and of course funding. (As an aside, if the current list of finite simple groups and the reasoning behind it are eventually accepted by all well-informed observers as correct, who will be cited for that theorem?)

Jim Humphreys
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    Personally, I don't see anything wrong with "Aguiar et al." – Gerry Myerson Sep 22 '10 at 12:49
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    FWIW my girlfriend is a doctor and is constantly dealing with papers with 20+ authors and always uses "et al". The difference is that in medecine the "lead author" is at the front! – Kevin Buzzard Sep 22 '10 at 13:32
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    I always prefer [N]. – dvitek Sep 22 '10 at 13:34
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    "Participants of the Supercharacters and combinatorial Hopf algebras conference 2010, Supercharacters, symmetric functions in noncommuting variables, and related Hopf algebras"? :D – darij grinberg Sep 22 '10 at 14:08
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    This paper really shows that we need a Bourbaki collective for algebraic combinatorics... – darij grinberg Sep 22 '10 at 14:09
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    The question I find more interesting is whether there is a reasonable way for 28 people to write a 23-page article. – John D. Cook Sep 22 '10 at 20:08
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    It is asked "whether there is a reasonable way for 28 people to write a 23-page article". Maybe a wiki? – Michael Hardy Sep 22 '10 at 20:23
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    I heard the following story concerning "et al" from a librarian. She told me that a student (I think of medical sciences) asked her why this "et al" did not get a Nobel prize for his fantastic amount of papers. – Roland Bacher Sep 23 '10 at 07:52
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    Thank you, by the way, for not numbering your references. I would much rather look at "[Aguiar et al.]" and say "oh, that paper" instead of "[19]" and have to look in the back. Obviously any single such distraction is no big deal but one encounters many in every paper. – Allen Knutson Sep 24 '10 at 17:58
  • Allen: Whether or not to number references is definitely an important issue about communication, though not just specific to my question. There are complications: how to preserve alphabetical order in a long reference list for easy location of authors, how to overcome default LaTeX styles, ... – Jim Humphreys Sep 27 '10 at 18:04
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    As a coauthor on the VIGRE paper in question, we have no problem being referred to as the UGA VIGRE Algebra Group. I have cited previous papers by the research group as [UGA1], [UGA2], etc. – Christopher Drupieski Oct 12 '10 at 13:20
  • @Christopher: My question was originally suggested by the AIM conference group preprint, which seems to be a one-time project and is awkward to reference. The UGA group has published some papers under a consistent label, though the membership of the group changes over time (but is not anonymous like Bourbaki). It will give citation counters a problem, I trust, when tracking the influence of individual authors. This kind of counting is getting very common in academia, including the newly issued NRC ratings. – Jim Humphreys Oct 14 '10 at 11:46
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    In the late 1960's a large group of number theorists at University of Michigan applied the ideas in Alan Baker's work on diophantine approximations to find all the solutions to a Diophantine equations. They originally submitted this with one author "Ann Arbor". The editor saw through their ruse, and was not amused.

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WKD-4CRP4GK-D7&_user=10&_coverDate=04%2F30%2F1972&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1499628232&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_use

     – Victor Miller Oct 15 '10 at 14:18
  • Victor, that link doesn't work for me. – JBL Oct 15 '10 at 14:22
  • @JBL, Try this link

    http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34194/1/0000483.pdf

     – Victor Miller Oct 15 '10 at 22:12
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    For whatever it's worth, Nat Thiem referred to the main result as "Theorem (Grinning ninnies)" in his talk at the MIT combinatorics seminar. (The name is part of an anagram of the last letters of the last names of the authors.) – JBL Oct 15 '10 at 22:57
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    @Roland Bacher http://arnaud-cheritat.fr/etale/ – Adam Epstein Sep 11 '12 at 18:57
  • Why does the length of the paper matter when referring to it? – LSpice May 17 '19 at 18:20
  • @LSpice: It probably wouldn't matter unless the length of the paper was short but with many authors. – Jim Humphreys May 17 '19 at 19:00
  • I mean: it seems to me that the number of authors alone is the issue; is it any easier or harder to put an entry in your reference list for a short paper with 28 authors, as compared to a long paper with 28 authors? – LSpice May 17 '19 at 19:21
  • This is why a paper with one author needs to be considered with different weighting to a paper which is written by more than four authors. Writing a paper with 27 other people is not the same as writing an entire paper by yourself. – Hollis Williams Jun 22 '20 at 00:27

5 Answers5

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Within the body of the text I would refer to the paper as work by "28 authors" but in the bibliography I would list them all .

Matt Young
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  • I second this as one cites usually at most one paper by 28 authors. This may be abbreviated to [28A] as I have seen it for the analogous but more common situation of six authors. – Lennart Meier Apr 17 '13 at 18:54
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I'd say in the text "Written by the University of Georgia Vigre group" and then list all the people in the bibliography or just say "by the 28 authors listed at the arXiv."

For the AIM workshop again I'd consider "by the AIM workshop on subject X." I'd also consider X,Y, et al. where X and Y were the organizers of the workshop. I think it's ok to use et al if there's some non-alphabetical way of assigning more credit to some people.

Noah Snyder
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The problems with using "et al." have been discussed at length on this blog post [1] and probably elsewhere on mathoverflow. However, these authors have left you in a slightly ridiculous situation if you try to give a full citation in the body of your text. So it seems that biting your tongue and using "et al." is the best way forward in that (apparently very unusual) situation.

It seems particularly bad to me to not list all the authors of a paper in the actual bibliography entry for the paper. Personally, I would list all of them in my submitted version and see whether the journal editor wants to force the matter.

1: http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/et-al-is-unethical/

Carl Mummert
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    Listing all authors is fine for an electronic version, and plenty of people seem confident that dead tree journals will soon become history (though I'm not so sure myself). But conversation about papers (including on blogs, MO etc.) certainly isn't about to obsolesce, so some solution to the "concise reference problem" really is needed! – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine Sep 22 '10 at 14:25
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    Well, one of the after-dinner topics that came up in discussion fairly recently was that for these AIM conferences which wants to foster collaboration and produce joint papers, one should really require, in the project proposal, a specification of a "Team Name". =) – Willie Wong Oct 12 '10 at 13:04
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Why not list the authors in the references/bibliography, and then as, say, [23] in the body of the paper?

Jeff Strom
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The question reminded me about one particular Ig Nobel Prize in Literature (1992):

Yuri Struchkov, unstoppable author from the Institute of Organoelement Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers he published between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days.

This has been given to a physicist(!) and I wonder how many scientists coauthored the masterpieces. I also wonder whether the groups at the University of Georgia can be nominated in the nearest future...

Added. People outside mathematics would be hardly surprised by the 28/23 article. By mistake I came accross arXiv:1008.1753 which has 62($\pm$1) authors (there is even no room for the last 3 in the list!) and "11 pages (including Appendices), 6 figures".

Wadim Zudilin
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    Wadim: I hope I'm misinterpreting you, but it sounds like you're being unfair to the UGA group. They do serious work, which wouldn't make good sport for an IgNobel. – Sheikraisinrollbank Oct 15 '10 at 14:23
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    That's nothing, the recent article http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1007/1007.0516v1.pdf lists 1063 authors, and the article itself is about 7 pages long! – J.C. Ottem Oct 15 '10 at 20:36
  • Sheikraisinrollbank, I do not consider my comment as unfair. First, I do not explicitly suggest them to be nominated for an Ig Nobel. Secondly, I do not count Ig Nobel as shame but as fun; take, for example, the last Nobel Prize in physics.$$ $$ J.C., your example is a real record, no doubts! – Wadim Zudilin Oct 16 '10 at 02:37
  • By the way, my supervisor was telling me that it is quite competitive to win the Ig Nobel prize and that people actively try to win it. It is certainly not regarded as shameful if one wins it, maybe even the opposite. He tried to make a possible case for nomination by creating a mini sperm collider in which sperms meet each other head on and collide (it didn't work). If I remember rightly, there are more than 1000 nominations for the prize each year, so it is competitive. – Hollis Williams Mar 24 '21 at 11:40