In response to a post at Nature's Nautilus that scoffs at papers with more than 20 contributing authors, blogger RPM points out that some disciplines need a lot of people to complete a project. In genome sequencing projects, RPM says, several people take part in proposing the idea, actually sequencing the genome, assembling it, and analyzing the sequence. Where an author's name appears in the list is significant, as the people at the beginning and at the end made the biggest contribution, the blogger adds.