The Birth of the Collective Author

By Robert Ubell
BioScience, Vol. 31, No. 2, February 1981, pp. 150–151

Remember when books were written by one author, not crowds of contributors? Remember when a meeting was just that, not a pretext to publish? To the observer, it is curious to overhear scientists longing for old times, for the return of the single author, disdaining symposia proceedings and contributed volumes.

The work researchers do forces them to lean over the edge of things, to peer into the entrails of cells or take the pulse of stars. Scientists are—or ought to be—intellectual revolutionaries, overturning conventional ideas with every experimental discovery or each new theory, not conservatives hoping for the restoration of the ancien régime. But when it comes to books—who writes them, what goes into them, how they are put together—scientists may as well be antique dealers, treasuring Victorian furnishings.

Contempt for the collection doesn’t prevent the disillusioned either from sending off their manuscripts for publication in the very products they abhor, or from feeling flattered by an invitation from a distinguished editor to put down several thousand words in a tome in which their name will fall in alphabetical order, bordering on anonymity in a long list. Scientists are split in half: Their opinions walk off in one direction; their intellectual needs take them in another.

Modern science no longer emerges from the work of isolated individuals tinkering in queer laboratories. A complex art, it demands the collaboration of thousands of men and women, each doing a part. Collective effort exists not only between two colleagues sharing the same bench or among several researchers in a lab, or even among groups in the same institution. It extends over long distances between different centers around the world. Each investigator is an actor on a giant, international stage, tenanted by many who hardly ever step to the footlights alone. When they deliver their lines, they often speak in a chorus.

Take the scholarly journal: One recent paper on human interferon in Nature was signed by 18—two baseball teams—from four different labs. During two months of Nature—nine issues published in September and October 1980—the magazine carried 279 articles and letters, only 35 papers of which were contributed by one person. Dual authorship accounted for 97, whereas the majority (147) came from three or more.

While the isolated author is either dead or fading fast, the heroic writer is being murdered by contemporary science. No one can absorb, reflect upon, and prepare the material required to cover a specialized field any longer. Just as it would be madness for one person to attempt to paint the George Washington Bridge, so it would be ludicrous for a single expert to try to recreate the grand syntheses that flourished at the turn of the century. There are more productive things to do with one’s time anyway.

It’s no surprise that most titles from scholarly presses no longer come from a single pen. They spring from many laboratories, mirroring the complexity of the material explored. There is a good case for casting suspicions on the hefty treatise brought out by one authority. Writers who claim to illuminate an entire subject all by themselves, who believe they have assimilated the literature and have grasped the heart of the discipline, may very well be taking us down the wrong intellectual path. We are more likely to come away better informed by five or ten chapters prepared by as many contributors. Collaborative books are a defeat for the individual author, but a victory for science. Without them, we could not hope to embrace all we need to know.

Then we turn to the poor proceedings volume: The more it’s maligned, the more it multiplies. If researchers hate them so, why do they persist in allowing themselves to be exploited? After all, they provide the words that fit between the covers. Scientists write articles for them and read them because they must consume vast quantities of data. And beyond the bits and pieces, researchers must be fed by reviews. If an easily digestible summary comes along packaged as something that started life as a workshop in Cincinnati, it’s still a welcome relief. And now that publishers have dreamed up ways of bringing them out more quickly, by employing less time-consuming and—sadly—less attractive typesetting techniques, these reports have a better chance of getting to the point without much fuss and delay.

Let’s not linger over the reasons why many proceedings fail. Those who regret the passing of an earlier age have already had their say. Yes, too often the chatter is poorly organized, redundant, and unrefereed. Yes, they are frequently sloppy, lack indexes, and are badly proofread. Yes, too many lecturers say the same thing too many times in too many different places. And, yes, they all cost too much.

But when they're good, they're very, very good. Reviewing a work based on a German conference, I. D. Kuntz, Jr. of the University of California at San Francisco concluded, “This is an excellent book. . . . It has enough new and thought-provoking material to serve as a sourcebook for advanced graduate courses and certainly belongs on library shelves even in these austere days.” When experts turn to the pages of good ones and are forced to judge them in print, snobbishness gives way to serious criticism and occasionally admiration.

Tradition informs us that great research is performed by great men. Heroic, isolated figures from the past people our Romantic landscape: Galileo under house arrest, Darwin aboard the Beagle. Einstein in the patent office. But we often worship gods with feet of clay. We now know that Darwin was helped by the work of Alfred Russel Wallace; Freud was not alone in Vienna; Einstein’s ideas developed under the influence of a circle of fine minds. Even extraordinary men need a little help from their friends. Yet we still suffer from the virus of the Victorian ideal: The authentic gentleman of science required help with his coat or with decanting his claret, not with things that mattered.

We admire and recall our celebrated ancestors with pleasure. They wrote clearly, succinctly, charmingly. But we mistake their diligence and training for genius, forgetting that in our day the pace of discovery and technological achievement is remarkable not because a select few have some bright ideas, but because advanced capitalism has successfully marshalled the force of many, even though ideologically it casts its attention on personal creativity.

We now recognize that knowledge moves by the hands and minds of us all. We may yet learn to look upon books created by teamwork with the same benevolence we find for science done by many.