Why research papers have so many authors

ONE thing that determines how quickly a researcher climbs the academic ladder is his publication record. The quality of this clearly matters--but so does its quantity. A long list of papers attached to a job application tends to impress appointment committees, and the resulting pressure to churn out a steady stream of articles in peer-reviewed journals often leads to the splitting of results from a single study into several "minimum publishable units", to the unnecessary duplication of studies a...