Academic Authorship - Anything Goes!
As a nascent academic scientist, one recurring problem I've noticed is authorship.
Publications are the currency of academic science. Without authoring publications, one cannot graduate from their Ph.D. program, obtain their next job, or get grant funding. Although we place such great importance on our publication records, the rules that govern authorship decisions, such as author order and the threshold for inclusion as an author, are nearly non-existent. For example, someone who did several experiments and hours of data analysis for a project might not be included as author, whereas someone who merely discussed a project once for 10 minutes at a conference could be included as an author.
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In this post, I'll discuss my ideas about the way authorship works now, and how I think it should be.
Before diving into this complex topic, lets discuss the status quo.
What does it mean to be the first author? the last author? a middle author?
What contribution(s) warrant inclusion as an author?
The only points of consensus, generally:
The author listed first is the person who 'owns' the project.
Some people think that the first author did the most work. While this is true in many cases, as scientific studies become more interdisciplinary and complex, drawing on the contributions of many people, the role of the first author has become muddied. First authors may have only served as a sub-manager of the project, acting in a role similar to the principal investigator (PI), but more managing the day-to-day project activities according to the structure agreed upon with the last author.
The author listed last is the group leader.
While this is often true, politically motivated decisions, such as an upcoming faculty application, or an impending retirement from the true leader, can easily cause 'guest' senior authorship to occur. In this case, although it might look like the last author was leading the project described in a manuscript, they actually did next-to-nothing for the project. I've seen this happen several times.
The middle authors provided necessary input, without which, the manuscript could not exist
Again, I've seen people added in a middle author position for doing literally nothing, and I've seen people who actually spent many hours on a project excluded.
What authorship means to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE):
The ICMJE sets a high bar for academic authorship:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Note the AND between each statement. You must do all of these to be included as an author according to ICMJE.
I've rarely seen anyone other than the first and last author meet all these criteria.
What authorship means to me.
Personally, I draw the line at significant intellectual contribution to a manuscript or conference abstract. You must have actually used your body of knowledge to positively influence a project. Performing the protocol steps to generate some data is not enough in my opinion. Someone who did early experiments related to a project, but had no involvement in the actual work presented within the manuscript or abstract is not an author. In no senario should someone receive authorship for a entirely complete manuscript that they have never seen before. This rule helps keep me sane while dealing with the apparently irrational authorship decisions occurring all around me everyday. Although I've argued for some level of consistency and logic in the past, I've never been able to keep the list authors accountable to these principles.
Authorship order:
The first author should have done the greatest portion of work, and be the primary person who actually drafted the manuscript. If a project has many aspects, and someone publishes a subset of that project, the person who did most of that subset should be the first author, not the person who 'owns' the project.
But the cheaters win:
Sadly, by trying to be ethical and uphold high authorship standards, we cannot compete with those who get added to papers willy-nilly for doing nothing. The people who are listed win, no matter if they did anything or not.
We need a better system for rewarding actual contributions, and we need incentives to promote ethical authorship practices.
Until we have this, the entire community will suffer, as inadequate scientists continue up the leadership ladder and taint all the work below their purview.
I don't have the answer yet, but I'm working on it, and I would love your input about how we can make the academic science community better through fair and transparent authorship.
Please share your opinions and experiences, as we need a healthy dialog before anything will change.
This is actually a big problem.
I have seen senior researchers try to take research that should be it's own article and try to include it in their paper to take ownership. I have seen people who have done a lot of work on a project be not included in the authorship list and I have seen people taking a long time to publish something hoping the other author will give up and forget about it.
They say that research is a politics game. You need to make the right person happy with the smallest input possible. I wish I had the answer on ownership but I think its a system that may not be able to change because there is no one governing it. I think if you wanted it to change you would have to make the journals change.
Thank you so much for your thoughts! I agree we would need to change the journals, but they would have no incentive.
One idea I've discussed with colleagues is that we need to take some ideas from the entertainment industry and get more public interest into research. But this wont fix everything, and I'm not sure how to generate the amount of public interest that, for example, football has.
You are absolutely right. It is so hard to get a good public interest on something like this.
Have you heard of the Heart Foundation Tick or something similar on food where the food product gets to display the tick if and only if it meets some predefined criteria and then this tick helps the customer know what is the best product to buy? Maybe a paper could have a similar thing. What you need though is a group of independent people to start, endorse it, regulate it and then also market it.
Imagine being the person behind something like that .... clearly I should be the first author if you publish a paper on it though haha!
Haha yea let's write a paper! I call last author!
But yeah the heart association tick-style endorsement would be cool to incorporate some kind of endorsement
This article has an interesting approach to tackle this problem: https://medium.com/@devang/science-first-scientists-later-6419cbc4ac9b
In general the whole scientific publishing sector needs a major update. The current system is quite broken I would say. What you're pointing out is one of the many symptoms.
Wow, thanks for sharing that article! I'm actually about to submit a paper to Cell Metabolism, and they 'strongly suggest' using that credit taxonomy, albeit still tucked away st the tail end of the paper. I really like the idea of only using that and dropping the author list!
I worked at a top-5 university as a postdoc, and can certainly attest to the concerns laid out here. My group was likely one of the worst culprits out there. One graduate student, prior to my arrival, published 37 papers because they created a monopoly on an electrochemical instrument. One of many stories...
Without sounding too redundant on this platform, what about a blockchain solution? I am happy to accept ample criticism on the technological issues of such a system. I have a background in chemistry and material science, with only a basic knowledge of coding.
In this way, the science is contracted out (i.e. some organization needs an experiment done). This experiment is completed by multiple nodes and therefore becomes verified and enters the block. This also ensures scientific results can be duplicated. As a scientist, you perform an experiment or provide some input, and you get a token reward. This token acts both as a monetary reward and a measurement to indicate how much ACTUAL scientific contribution you have made to the world.
How to ensure individuals don't get exploited and become forced to give their token to their PI or someone else is something I'm still thinking about, along with various other logistical challenges. Let me know if you have any thoughts. Also, a nice article looking at this concept can be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Soenke_Bartling/publication/306107836_Blockchain_for_science_and_knowledge_creation_-_A_technical_fix_to_the_reproducibility_crisis/links/57b211fb08ae0101f17a580b.pdf
Thanks for the post by the way.
Wow, thanks for the thoughtful comment! I've also thought about how to implement blockchain technology to help solve these issues. I really like the article you shared, it is very comprehensive from data storage, to experiment registration, and even publishing.
Are you aware of anyone who has implemented this? It would be difficult to do all of it correctly, but the pieces are definitely available.
Digital Science (https://www.digital-science.com) is a company that spun out of Nature Publishing that seems to be focusing on some aspects of utilizing blockchain for scientific publishing. They only really seem focused on pushing the current publishing system, just in the cloud era...
Blockchain for Science (https://www.blockchainforscience.com) seems more focused on the reproducibility issue and decentralization. A co-founder was the author of the previous article. The executive summary is a bit undefined, but I haven't done a deep review of the white paper. I will do that and create a new post some time this week, at least from the scientist perspective.
Thanks for the interesting info, it really helps deepen the discussion!
While pursuing a career in patent law I had suspected the rules on intellectual ownership of research papers were hazy and ill-implemented in comparison with the strictly defined and regulated patenting and trademarking industries - one can't help but feel the notable difference is the money that corporations have at their disposal to throw at lawyers in protection/predation of intellectual property, which research institutes and fellows simply do not.
The consensus (and I agree) seems to be that the scientific research setup requires reform, and that a shift away from political manoeuvering towards fair reward and incentivisation is needed to rejuvenate an outdated system currently rewarding intellectual dishonesty with acclaim and tenure.
It will be interesting to see if/how parallels develop between research and corporate intellectual property in the future.
Fascinating piece!
Thanks for your input!
I do think we are slowing moving towards increased standards like patent law, but the process has been slow thus far.
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Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.
What?