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Image Credits: Augustus Leopold Egg, The Travelling Companions (1862). Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

— Written by San Choudhury

‘Zhang et al.’ has made it out of the thousands of journal articles in our scientific literature and onto our academic social media feeds. If you thought you’d finally landed on an original research question, Zhang et al. has probably already addressed it. Writing a literature review? Yeah, well, tough luck doing that without citing Zhang et al. Zhang et al. is no longer just an in-text citation that we include in our papers and theses. Instead, as academic creators satirise the abundance and apparent omnipresence of ‘Zhang et al.’ citations across the scientific literature, it has become something of a meme.

Zhang is apparently the third most common surname in China, or so I learned from Zhang’s Wikipedia page. Alongside this, Chinese institutions have become the world’s most prolific producers of scientific articles. Between 2008 and 2023, China rose from 14th to 1st in global research output, overtaking the United States in 2020 and now producing almost a fifth of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific publications. The sheer volume of scientific papers emerging from China, combined with the fact that Zhang is one of the country’s most common surnames, is becoming increasingly visible as academic creators make sense of their bibliographies, from which Zhang always seems to be staring back at them.

What makes the joke funny, though, I think is not simply that Zhang appears so often. It is that thousands of entirely unrelated scholars become compressed into a single recurring bibliographic character. Citation styles that were designed to identify publications have ended up creating an illusion of sorts that one impossibly prolific researcher has written half the scientific literature. Somewhere along the way, Zhang et al. has now become academia’s busiest fictional scholar.

Self-aware academic creators who have turned this phenomenon into a meme, and the millions of people worldwide who relate to Zhang et al. memes, have not, I find it hard to believe, picked up on this simply because Zhang is a particularly common surname or because global research output is now dominated by Chinese institutions. I like to be a tad more phenomenological when thinking about the possible reasons behind the emergence of, and resonance with, trends like these. Rather than asking why Zhang appears so often, I find it fascinating to think how researchers have come to experience Zhang et al. as being everywhere. How, in fact, does Zhang et al. surface in the awareness of contemporary researchers such that it has become an online phenomenon?

Beyond the proliferation of Chinese research output, we know that the scale of scientific publishing more broadly has reached absurd proportions.  Now, I'm not saying this simply to suggest that Zhangs reside outside China as well, and that it therefore makes sense for them to be co-authoring a remarkable proportion of academic publications. While Zhang may be one of the most common surnames in the world, with more than 100 million people sharing the name, I don’t think that fact alone explains why people have started noticing Zhang appearing so frequently in their bibliographies. It becomes far more interesting when we put these facts together: global scientific output has grown enormously over the past few decades, China contributes a substantial share of that growth, and Zhang happens to be one of the world’s most common surnames. Taken together, these factors undoubtedly increase Zhang’s visibility. Yet even their combined effect is not enough to explain why researchers notice Zhang all the time.

There’s more to it than meets the eye – or, perhaps more appropriately, it's about the way Zhang et al. is being met by the eyes of academics. Think about the way we’ve actually been interacting with the ever-growing body of scientific literature as we attempt to ‘stay on top of it all’.