51¹ú²úÊÓƵ

Your report of a paper with 144 authors does not begin to do justice to the possibilities.

In 2002, I came across a seven-page article in The Lancet that listed more than 900 authors, but the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research informs me that "the academic paper with the greatest number of co-authors is a medical report by Topol, Califf, Van de Werf, Armstrong and their 972 co-authors, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. It has 100 times as many authors as pages."

For this, the four co-authors named above shared the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature.

Alistair McCulloch, Academic developer: research education, 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of South Australia.