Of course, they will most likely all be co-authored pieces, but the significant point is that the REF rules, except in special cases, impose no penalty on genuinely co-authored work; they explicitly state that it is welcomed. In most cases, there is no disadvantage in submitting a co-authored item to the exercise (although there is some complication when co-authors submit in the same return); it is not as if it counts as half an output or less.

he practice of promiscuous coauthor-ship puts considerable stress on this tried and tested model.

e well-estab-lished “conventions of impersonality” in scientific writing(Hyland, 1999, p. 355) and resulting in the erasure of styl

n a sample of 2,101 scientificpapers published between 1665 and 1800, Beaver andRosen found that 2.2% described collaborative work. No-table was the degree of joint authorship in astronomy,especially in situations where scientists were dependentupon observational data.

French science was much more profession-alized and institutionalized than was the case in either of theother European powers. Specifically, they found that morethan half of all the coauthored scientific articles in theirhistoric sample had been produced by French scientists.