It is no secret that industry labs are competing with academia at a pace never seen before. Most of the tech conferences now are dominated by industries with superior funding, human resources, and data.
What surprises me is that papers from industry are often written by a large number of authors. In fact, whenever I see a citation/reference with a whole string of authors, I can immediately predict that it comes from industry labs. Why is this the case?
For example, this very short and simple looking paper from Google is authored by 9 people.
Here is another very brief paper from Google, similar to the style of an undergraduate project. Now why is 12 people needed to put it together?
Take a look at another paper from Facebook. What looks to me to be a survey paper with no simulation or any equation required 17 authors.
Or this, again, very short joint paper from Apple, Facebook, Google. Why 11 authors?
Why does this Google paper (that has three labeled equations in total) require 16 authors? Are these people gaming the publication/citation count system or what.
Why does this other Google paper require 31 authors? Am I to believe that they all contributed equally?
Can someone please chime in as to why these papers require so many authors? I say many because I've seen student projects or theses written by a single person that (more than) rivals the depth of those papers that require some 15 people to write.