How many of my coauthors do I “know”?

Posted on June 30, 2021 Updated on July 2, 2021

I do not know all of my co-authors.

In neuroimaging, the research paper author lists can be long and different researchers are involved in different parts of the research. As a data scientist one does not necessarily interact with some of the other researchers in a research project.

In collaborative efforts such as the Danish Gigaword project resulting in the The Danish Gigaword Corpus (Scholia), I neither know all. The team was mostly assembled by Leon Derczynski (Scholia) and we each did our part with a bit of coordination via an email list.

Using the data in Wikidata, I can get a list of my co-authors. The Wikidata Query Service result is here. The query service currently lists 125 authors including “et al.”.

Depending on how you define “know”, I count somewhere around 25 to 30 unknown co-authors, i.e., around 20% to 25% of my co-authors are “unknown” to me.

In some case “know” might be asymmetry, e.g., I could say that I “know” Morten L. Kringelbach (Scholia), but he probably does not “know” me. We are connected through The personality trait openness is related to cerebral 5-HTT levels (Scholia) where Jan Kalbitzer (Scholia) was the first author – and connector.