Eponyms in Science: how long can they get?

Abstract The number of coauthors in peer-reviewed articles increased significantly in the last two decades, mainly driven by large multinational collaborations in physics and medicine. We are presenting a similar trend in the number of names used in eponyms. One-, two-, and three-name eponyms have been used for centuries, eponyms with four or five names appeared first at the end of the twentieth century, and creating six- and seven-name eponyms is a phenomenon of the last decade. Due to the plethora of eponyms in the scientific literature, most examples are related to nonlinear dynamical systems, the first-author’s field of research. Longer eponyms were usually first used in the article body and abstract before appearing in an article title. To combine scientific concepts and/or adding names to create new eponymns, some scientists use eponymic acronyms to shorten new eponyms while preserving the idea of honoring previous work or offering a ‘short hand’ for defining their system. Unfortunately, the more names are added, the more variations can be created. We discuss these issues and also highlight the importance of distinguishing between the use of hyphens [-] and dashes [–].