Long author-lists on research papers are threatening the academic work system

This month, a scientific paper by teams working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN set the record for the number of authors on a paper: more than 5,000 contributors. In the same week, a genomics paper had more than 1,000 authors. The trend of increasingly long author-lists on research papers is clearly getting out of hand. But in addition to being impractical, it is also threatening the entire system by which academic work is rewarded.