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In an era of big research, having confidence in scientists, individually or collectively, involves trade-offs. Science is ideally built on evidence but in reality, for most people, it is based on trust. Scientific evidence is hard to access. Journals are difficult to get and their articles, written in specialised language, are only understandable to a few field experts. So, we trust experts' results without being able to question them ourselves, believing that if needed, someone knowledgeable will.

Historically, the reputation of individual scientists has been important in facilitating the spread of scıentific theories and discoveries. If a scientist is, or can appear to be, trustworthy, so might that scientist's ideas.

This can lead to odd consequences. Recognisable scientists receive more credit and trust, while unrecognisable scientists often have their work overlooked. The history of science is filled with cases where basic papers written by relatively unknown scientists were neglected for years. Consider the case of Joseph Fourier, whose classic paper on the propagation of heat had to wait 13 years to be published.

Since recognisable scientists receive disproportionate (不成比例的) credit, their names become disproportionately associated with discoveries. Statistics professor Stephen Stigler formulated "Stigler's law of eponymy" (斯蒂格勒命名法则), stating no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. For instance, Pythagoras wasn't the first to discover the Pythagorean theorem, nor was Edwin Hubble the first to formulate Hubble's law.

However, modern science operates differently. Large collaborative (合作的) projects often produce papers with hundreds of authors. The record for the number of authors on a single scientific paper is currently 5,154. Furthermore, an editorial board composed of project group members actually wrote the papers. The papers were then placed on an electronic bulletin board for criticism and comment by all. Some massive collaborative projects constantly maintain author lists of hundreds of names, which are automatically submitted on every publication.

If we can't identify the thousands in big science projects or know their actual authors, who do we trust? I'd say we trust "science" itself regardless of the individual scıentısts' integrity. We trust the organisations that are considered scientific. Any clickbait news articles with "Science Says" in the title show this shift from trusting individuals to trusting the scientific enterprise.

This shift to trusting "science" itself has risks. Misidentifying experts or trusting dishonest ones can abuse scientific erodibility. A striking example is Merchants of Doubt, where experts hid truths about acid rain and global warming. Authorship, then, serves one last function, which in some cases only benefits the historian like me: accountability.