The compositions in the Guru Granth Sahib are not signed with the names of their authors. A heading gives the rag, and then a number, and the number identifies which Guru: the first, the third, the fifth, the ninth. The convention is uniform across the volume and it is not a matter of scribal shorthand.
The Sikh understanding is that the succession of Gurus carried one light in different bodies, and the numbering states that directly. It is not ten authors filed together; it is one voice at ten stages, and the numbering is the notation for it. Guru Nanak's compositions and Guru Arjan's are separated by five successions and a century, and the volume marks the distance with a digit.
Complicating this productively, the compositions of the Gurus frequently use the name Nanak within the verse itself, whichever Guru composed them, which is the internal counterpart of the same claim and one of the ways scholars can identify a Guru's work when a heading is damaged or absent.
The bhagats, by contrast, are named. Their compositions carry the poet's name, and the difference is not a slight but a distinction: they are individual voices gathered into the volume, not stages of a single one.
The system is exact enough to be used as a tool. Manuscript scholars comparing early copies of the Granth track disagreements in these headings closely, because a difference in attribution between two manuscripts is a datable trace of how the text was transmitted.