‘What’s an author?’ asks Robin Rose of Oregon State University on Nautilus. Commenting on a Nature paper with 21 authors, he lists ten questions that address the validity of authorship. Nature journals do not specify a particular order or maximum number of authors, but we do strongly encourage the inclusion of a statement on the actual contribution of each co-author.
In a lively response to Rose’s post, Antoine Blanchard cites strategies developed by high-energy physicists to deal with ‘hyperauthorship’. John Quackenbush points to the realities of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations to achieve something that could not be done alone. “We should stop worrying about who did what and instead ask how the work advances the field. This is science after all, not accounting.”
Similarly, Steven Salzberg writes: “The malaria genome paper (M. J. Gardner et al. Nature 419, 498–511; 2002) had nearly 50 authors. That was the culmination of a 6-year effort by an international consortium, and everyone on the author list (including me) spent years on some aspect of the project.”
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From the blogosphere
An archive of the "From the Blogosphere" column on the Authors page in Nature, highlighting nature.com blog posts of interest to scientists in their role as authors and peer-reviewers. We welcome comments and suggestions.
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What's an author? -- 6 September 2007
- Date:
- Thursday, 06 Sep tember 2007 - 13:45 GMT
Last updated: Thursday, 06 Sep 2007 - 13:45 GMT
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Comments
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The BMJ has a brief statement in their submission guidelines on what constitutes “authorship”, where they take issue with the definition of authorship by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Their own approach gives preferenct to short lists of authors and long lists of contributors.
They also have a collection of articles relating to authorship (conflict of interest, ghost writing, etc.)
Thanks, Hilary. I think it is very hard when a journal begins to get involved in the politics of the rules for authors of a particular paper. Among many other factors, different disciplines have different “rules” (and different labs or groups within a discipline, as well as geographical and cultural differences). The journal is in effect being asked to arbitrate in relationships, manners and arrangements within labs and groups, matters which the funder or the institution should have clear guidelines about, as a condition of the grant or the lab space/employment.
The BMJ is a pioneer in many issues like this (they provide excellent peer-review resources too), but they are of course a single-discipline, medics, and medicine has a particular ethics associated with it.
At Nature, our encouragement, which could if the scientific community seemed mainly in favour of it, of authors to list their contributions to the paper, seems to me to be a good way to go, as it discourages “honorary” authorship and is transparent with readers.
Sorry, I omitted two words from the last paragraph of my comment, in bold below.
At Nature, our encouragement, which could if the scientific community seemed mainly in favour of it, become mandatory, of authors to list their contributions to the paper, seems to me to be a good way to go, as it discourages “honorary” authorship and is transparent with readers.