Academic Paper Authorship

The academic world has lots of dark nooks and crannies not usually seen by the general public. One of them is the order in which authors are listed on a publication. If you have six people from two or three laboratories collaborating on an important paper, who will be the "senior author." And what does senior author mean? And how do you find the senior author on the list of names attached to the paper? It turns out that different disciplines have different conventions.

Authorship practice varies by field, making interdisciplinary collaborations and the subsequent author lists more complicated. In physics papers, senior and corresponding authors are listed at the beginning of the author list, whereas, in chemistry, the senior author is sometimes the first author on a paper, even if a postdoc completed the bulk of the work. In the life sciences, first listing is usually given to the researcher who did most of the work, both physical and intellectual, and last billing goes to the mentor or person who guided the project and whose grant money paid for the project - the PI. "This new movement toward group authorship ... can get very confusing," says Katrina Kelner, deputy editor for life sciences at Science magazine. (The Scientist)

Authorship priority disputes can be one of the most contentious and unpleasant experiences you can have in academia. I've only had one and by some standards it was pretty mild. I still talk to the person. But one reason for my fairly benign experience in that regard is that I don't care much about it. I have been high on the totem pole for a long time and haven't needed to get my name on a million papers. EEven as the person to whom the grant money is given I haven't insisted on having my name on the papers the grant produces if I didn't do significant work on it. At the same time I have made an effort to get graduate students and post docs on papers, usually listed first if it is primarily their work. The one dispute I had was over whether a a graduate student or the PI of the grant (in that case it wasn't me) should be listed first. It was my graduate student and I held out for that and that's the way it wound up. But it was unpleasant.

That instance shows that even a laid back attitude may not be sufficient to avoid the problem. If we collaborate with another lab or research group, they have a claim, too, and often that claim is counter to a valid claim of ours. Since this affects the careers of our graduate students, post docs and junior faculty I need to make an issue of it at times, although this has happened rarely. If a colleague has a good argument I usually let them have it. It's not worth rupturing a good working relationship. Often I will pre-empt the discussion by sending back a draft that has a colleague's name first, even before the subject comes up.

Scientific journals are starting to assert themselves in this area, particularly over the issue of whose names should be on the grant at all:

According to the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), analyzing and interpreting data are the primary requirements for authorship, whereas acquiring funding, collection of data, and general supervision of research alone do not merit authorship. This method of deciding authorship is common, according to Harvey Markovitch, chair of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).

Well, OK. Maybe those are the theoretical rules, but they are more often honored in the breach. While I leave my own name off papers, I habitually put students' names on them, even if what they did doesn't rise to the level of authorship according to ICMJE. They get a big psychological boost to seeing their name on a journal article and it encourages them to persevere in science, an encouragement in much need these days of shrinking research dollars. We are in danger of losing a generation of future scientific leaders and I figure any little bit helps.

As grant funding gets tighter the authorship question becomes more important. Reviewers often look at a publication list and judge the merit of an applicant by where he or she has published, how often and in what journals. This encourages some rather bad habits (the Least Publishable Unit syndrome, for example) but it is becoming a career imperative.

So you thought a scientific paper was just a scientific paper?