Is it true that articles in high-impact journals involve, in average, more coauthors?

A while ago, I was involved in writing a review article, which finally included around 270 references. Being not very experienced in using BibTeX, I had to manually enter many references in my TeX-file. There I noticed that Nature and Science entries took more time to handle because they usually come with more than 4 coauthors.

Today, I searched a bit on the internet (around 2 hours) and I did not find a solid answer to my question. Instead, I found very interesting articles from Eugen Tarnow about coauthorship in physics and junior physicists’ perception of authorship. In these articles, based on detailed surveys, Tarnow discusses that not all the authorships are awarded decently. As an example, he has found that: “The probability of any third and subsequent coathors being judged as inappropriate is 23% for the APS guideline, [and] 67% for the tighter guideline of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors“.

I could not find any research on the correlation of impact-factor of a journal with the average number of the coauthors of its articles. According to Newman (in PNAS 101) the average number of coauthors for physics articles in arxiv between 1995 and 1999 was 2.5 author per paper. This number has certainly increased in the recent years. I counted the number of authors in the most recent ~100 articles of five journals and took the average number of authors per letter or article. The results are:

• Physical Review B: 4.5
• Physical Review Letters: 4.6
• Optics Express: 4.8
• Nature Physics: 7.0
• Nature Nanotechnology: 6.3

I have selected the satellites journals of Nature to avoid the influence of biology articles, which are known to have more coauthors. Based on my small-scale counting, I may say that the answer to my question at the beginning is: “Yes!” But I would be happy to see more quantitative results.

Why does an article in Nature or Science have more coauthors? I do not know. An optimist may say that larger collaborations, nowadays, produce results that are of higher impact. A pessimist may conclude that because the stakes are higher for such an article it brings in more coauthorship claims.

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