That is how the LHC collaborations have fixed their rules. One provides service tasks for the collaboration and one can sign the papers. At the end, you need both people to monitor the detectors and people to analyze data, don't you?
But what you cannot do at the end is to compare LHC experimenters to other field scientists in therms of citations. This is just wrong.
I am not comparing. It may be clear to you how LHC collaborations are like because you know the rules. But people outside the LHC (like me, for e.g.) might not entirely know or understand the rules. And yes, now that you mention about thousands of people running and monitoring the LHC.
Then, it may be possible to list the LHC as an outlier outside of the science norm.
But, still, it really raised a lot of eyebrows....
I can understand that. I do no know how are the rules outside particle physics. Probably not that well :)