According to the American Society of Microbiology, «an author is one who made a substantial contribution to the overall design and execution of the experiments; therefore, all authors are responsible for the entire paper. Individuals who provided assistance, e.g., supplied strains or reagents or critiqued the paper, need not be listed as authors but may be recognized in the Acknowledgments section. »

Author lists have grown lengthy in many fields of science, but when a Drosophila genomics paper¹ was published with more than 1,000 authors, it sparked discussion online about the meaning of authorship.