Campaigns and petitions
From Scratchpad
[edit] Guest Authorship must die!
Self-promotion has always been a part of science. The story of Archimedes doesn’t end with him running down the street in Syracuse shouting ‘Objects displace a volume of water equal to their mass!’, it ends with him running down the street in Syracuse shouting ‘I have found it!’ Nobody else.
Modern scientific papers state ‘We have discovered that this is the truth’. There are two clauses in that sentence:
- We have discovered
- this is the truth
If the second clause is false, scientific careers can often be destroyed and are often blighted. Why should the same rigour not apply to the first clause?
The current system of attributing authorship on a paper is weighted against postdocs. Most postdocs will know of a paper in which similar contributions by postdocs and PIs are rewarded with authorship for the PIs, but relegation to the acknowledgements for the postdoc. While this is unfair, we do not expect PIs to act in anything other than their own self-interest and therefore do not condemn their behaviour. Instead, we condemn a system which places disproportionate emphasis on publication rate. If you'd like to take part in a survey about this, one is here.
1. Attribution of data. If authorship is to remain binary (author/not author), then authorial contributions should be more clearly defined. What is needed, in effect, is some sort of markup language which describes the work of individual authors. There are a number of ways in which this could be done. First, the conributions of individual authors could be listed; PNAS already operates a system like this[1]. Second, a paper consists of data and interpretation. Data are presented in figures and tables. It would not be hard to introduce a system in which each of these was attributed with, say, authors’ initials. Alternatively, each subheading could be tagged with authors’ initials. And third, the person in which papers are written could be changed from the indefinite third person ('we isolated the protein and then weighed it') to the definite third person ('Peter isolated the protein and Jane weighed it'). If naming people seems odd in a scientific paper, consider the precedent of talking about prior work in the introduction; 'Smith has shown that...'
2. Assistants. Suggestion 1 simply aims to prick consciences and, as such, is subject to the same drawbacks as the current system. While it can offer a clearer idea of who is responsible for what, it cannot prevent misattribution. To counter this, authorship must be graded. First rank authors should be reserved for those who have had significant creative input, second rank authors are those who have had more limited creative input. For instance, under this system the technicians who did all the work on Dolly[2] would be assistant authors.
By introducing a new rank of authorship, which I will call assistant authorship, contributors who feel desperate for recognition will still headline[3] without drawing attention away from the more senior partners. This happens in music[4] and sport[5], why not in Science? This should favour postdocs who would otherwise not make it onto the front page.
3. Referees’ choice. Suggestions 1 and 2 suffer from the same ultimate limitation, which is that authorship is determined by authors. A more radical system would be one in which mss. were submitted anonymously. Each author who felt that they had made a contribution would write a paragraph listing who they thought should be the authors and why. The referees, in addition to evaluating the scientific merit of the ms., would also be responsible for deciding the composition and order of authors. We do not think that this would add significantly to the workload of the referees; indeed, they’d probably quite enjoy it.
[edit] References
- ↑ 'Authors must indicate their specific contributions to the published work. This information will be posted online as a footnote to the paper.' [1]
- ↑ Who really made Dolly? Tale of British triumph descends into scientists' squabble. The Guardian, Sat. March 11th [2]
- ↑ Nobody reads acknowledgements, except the people in them
- ↑ Groovejet (If this ain't love) by Spiller (featuring Sophie Ellis Bextor), for example[3]
- ↑ Assists in Basketball, for example[4]
