More and more, more and more scientists are ganging up to write research studies. It's no longer unusual to see a paper that lists more than 500 - that's five hundred - co-authors.

The journal Science Watch tracks statistics about which scientists publish where, when and how often. Every few years, Science Watch makes a brave plunge into the sea of so-called multi-author papers. Its most recent look shows that increasing numbers of papers have 50, 100, 200 and even 500 authors.

The most gaudy, of course, are the papers credited to more than 500 co-authors. During 2003, only (only!) 40 of these big group efforts were published. Then came a growth spurt. 2005 saw the publication of 131 of them, and subsequent years have seen production hold about steady.

If there were a prize for the largest number of co-authors, it would have gone to the 2,512 people credited with writing Precision Electroweak Measurements on the Z Resonance, which appeared in the journal Physics Reports in 2006. That's a mild elevation from the previous record of 2,458 co-authors, attained just two years earlier when the Circulation Journal published a paper called Design and Baseline Characteristic of a Study of Primary Prevention of Coronary Events with Pravastatin Among Japanese with Mildly Elevated Cholesterol Levels.

In fact, at least one prize has been awarded for the highest number of co-authors. In 2003, the Ig Nobel prize for literature went to the approximately 976 co-authors of a medical study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That paper also had the distinction of having 100 times as many authors as pages.

In the new record-holder, the list of 2,512 authors stretches over 19 pages. These hard-writing individuals come from more than 100 different institutions in many countries - the UK, Germany, Canada, Italy, Hungary, France, Switzerland, Canada, Israel, Japan, Poland, China, Belgium, Australia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Sweden among them.

They appear to be a sociable bunch. The very first word in their paper is "we", and the final section elaborates on that same theme: "We would like to thank the Cern accelerator divisions ... The SLD collaboration would like to thank the Slac accelerator department .... We would also like to thank members of the CDF, Dø, NuTeV and E-158 collaborations ..." And so on.

The paper's "references" section lists 264 papers that in some way influenced the new research. Nearly all of those referenced papers have author lists too long to be, well, listed in the new paper. Each list is credited only in abbreviated fashion: "FJ Hasert, et al", "G Arnison, et al", "M Banner, et al". And so forth.

It seems cold to discuss a group of 2,512 authors without mentioning any of their names. But space here is limited. Space there is limited, too - no first names are given, only initials. So suffice to say that the final author in the group is J Zhou.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize