[Steuard]

It's quite possible that there's a real effect here. But while I've only had time to skim parts of the paper, I don't see any indication of whether the authors have accounted for the different norms in different fields when analyzing their data for potentially fraudulent or deceptive behavior.

Just for example, physics papers produced by large international collaborations (e.g. every single paper from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN) routinely have hundreds of authors (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567): everyone who has made substantial contributions to the design and operation of the facility is listed, as is everyone on the data analysis teams. (My understanding is that people in those specific fields all recognize that "number of citations" is a mostly meaningless number for those involved, and other metrics for productivity are well-known in those communities and routinely used.) I hear that some genomics papers have broken 1000 authors as well.

I could easily imagine that the high end of observed publication numbers and coauthor counts would be dominated by those giant collaborations, even though there is absolutely no attempt to mislead anyone in the process. Can anyone tell from this article to what degree its conclusions might be influenced by this factor?