Author inflation in academic literature | (R news & tutorials)

"There seems to be a general consensus that author lists in academic articles are growing. Wikipedia says so, and I’ve also come across a published letter and short Nature article which accept this is the case and discuss ways of mitigating the issue. Recently there was an interesting discussion on academia.stackexchange on the subject but again without much quantification. Luckily given the array of literature database APIs and language bindings available, it should be pretty easy to investigate with some statistical analysis in R ... ROpenSci offers nice R language bindings for the PLOS (I’m more used to PLoS but I’ll go with it) API, called rplos. There’s no particular reason to limit the search to PLOS journals but rplos seems significantly more straightforward to work with than pubmed API packages I’ve used in the past like RISmed ..."