Authorship can be tricky business. It is easy to establish
agreed upon rules within, say, your lab or among frequent collaborators, but
with large collaborations, multiple authorship traditions can cause tension.
Different groups may not even agree on who should be included as an author (see Part 1), much less what order they should appear. The number of authors per
paper has steadily increased over time reflecting broad cultural shifts in science.
Research is now more collaborative, relying on different skill sets and
expertise.
Within large collaborations are researchers who have
contributed to differing degrees and author order needs to reflect these
contribution levels. But this is where things get complicated. In different
fields of study, or even among sub-disciplines, there are substantial
differences in cultural norms for authorship. According to Tscharntke andcolleagues (2007), there are four main author order strategies:
- Sequence determines credit (SDC), where authors are ordered according to contribution.
- Equal contribution (ED), where authors are ordered alphabetically to give equal credit.
- First-last-author emphasis (FLAE), where last author is viewed as being very important to the work (e.g., lab head).
- Percent contribution indicated (PCI), where contributions are explicitly stated.
The main approaches in ecology and evolutionary biology are
SDC and FLAE, though journals are increasingly requiring PCI, regardless of
order scheme. This seems like a good compromise allowing the two main
approaches (SDC & FLAE) to persist without confusing things. However, PCI
only works if people read these statements. Grant applications and CVs seldom
contain this information, and the perspective from these two cultures can bias
career-defining decisions.
I work in a general biology department with cellular and
molecular biologists who wholeheartedly follow FLAE. They may say things like
“I need X papers with me as last author to get tenure”. As much as I probe them
about how they determine author order in multi-lab collaborations, it is not clear
to me how exactly they do this. I know that all the graduate students appear
towards the front in order of contribution, but the supervisor professors
appear in reverse order starting from the back. Obviously an outsider cannot
disentangle the meaning of such ordering schemes without knowing who the
supervisors were.
The problem is especially acute when we need to consider how
much people have contributed in order to assign credit (see Part 3 on assigning
credit). With SDC, you know that author #2 contributed more than the last
author. With FLAE, you have no way of knowing this. Did the supervisor fully
participate in carrying out the research and writing the paper? Or did they
offer a few suggestions and funding? The are cases where the head of ridiculously
large labs appears as last author on dozens of publications a year, and
grumbling from those labs insinuate that the professor hasn’t even read half
the papers.
Under SDC, this person should appear as the last author,
reflecting this minimal contribution, but this shouldn’t give the person some
sort of additional credit.
In my lab, I try to enforce a strict SDC policy, which is
why I appear as second author on a number of multi-authored papers coming out
of my lab. I do need to be clear about this when my record is being reviewed in
my department, or else they will think some undergrad has a lab somewhere. Even
with this policy, there are complexities, such as collaborations with other
labs we follow FLAE, such as with many European colleagues. I have two views on
this, which may be mutually exclusive. 1) There is a pragmatic win-win, where I
get to be second author and some other lab head gets the last position and
there is no debate about who deserves this last position. But 2) this enters
morally ambiguous territory where we each may receive elevated credit depending
on whether people look at the order through SDC or FLAE.
I guess the win-win isn’t so bad, but it would nice if there
was an unambiguous criterion directing author order. And the only one that is
truly unambiguous is SDC –with ED (alphabetical) for all the authors after the
first couple in large collaborations. The recent paper by Adler and colleagues(2011) is a perfect example of how this should work.
References:
Tscharntke T, Hochberg ME, Rand TA, Resh VH, Krauss J (2007)
Author Sequence and Credit for Contributions in Multiauthored Publications.
PLoS Biol 5(1): e18. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050018
Adler, P. B., E. W.
Seabloom, E. T. Borer, H. Hillebrand, Y. Hautier, A. Hector, W. S. Harpole, L.
R. O’Halloran, J. B. Grace, T. M. Anderson, J. D. Bakker, L. A. Biederman, C.
S. Brown, Y. M. Buckley, L. B. Calabrese, C.-J. Chu, E. E. Cleland, S. L. Collins,
K. L. Cottingham, M. J. Crawley, E. I. Damschen, K. F. Davies, N. M. DeCrappeo,
P. A. Fay, J. Firn, P. Frater, E. I. Gasarch, D. S. Gruner, N. Hagenah, J.
Hille Ris Lambers, H. Humphries, V. L. Jin, A. D. Kay, K. P. Kirkman, J. A.
Klein, J. M. H. Knops, K. J. La Pierre, J. G. Lambrinos, W. Li, A. S.
MacDougall, R. L. McCulley, B. A. Melbourne, C. E. Mitchell, J. L. Moore, J. W.
Morgan, B. Mortensen, J. L. Orrock, S. M. Prober, D. A. Pyke, A. C. Risch, M.
Schuetz, M. D. Smith, C. J. Stevens, L. L. Sullivan, G. Wang, P. D. Wragg, J.
P. Wright, and L. H. Yang. 2011. Productivity Is a Poor Predictor of Plant
Species Richness. Science 333:1750-1753.
1 comment:
How about the corresponding author, Marc? In China, the first author and the corresponding author are viewed as the most important ones. Most of the time, the corresponding author is the last author following FLAC, and the corresponding author could also be the second author following SDC. Most CVs contain that "I have n and x papers with me as first and corresponding author respectively". The first author is more important for the young students. And if the supervisors want to get a higer position, they must have enough papers with them as corresponding authors.
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