Joint first authors
Martin Fenner
Thursday, 06 December 2007 11:22 UTC
Journal articles have more and more authors. As part of this trend we also see joint first authors, i.e. “Jim and John contributed equally to this work”. I personally try to avoid this whenever possible, because it looks like a trick to have more of the prestigous first authorships. Is there policy for this at Nature?
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Replies
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Martin, you have asked one of those questions which I can answer in two different ways!
First, as a reader, I couldn’t agree with you more. It is very silly, because how can two people “contribute equally” unless they did all the same experiments, analysis and so on as each other? When I read something, I regard the “authors” as the people who did the work and are writing about it, and find “equal contributions” statements irrelevant and even annoying.
Second, and this is the answer that is appropriate for this forum;-), as a Nature editor, the answer is that we don’t encourage this practice but we do allow it. We encourage authors to provide a list of their individual contributions in the “author information” section at the end of their manuscript. I took a look recently to see how many papers carry these statements, and it seems that about half do, which is good. (See this Nautilus post).
However, we are constantly lobbied by authors who say they “have” to have equal coauthorship for career reasons, so we do allow it.Here is the relevant section of the Nature guide to authors:
”Nature prefers authors to be listed without details of relative status, but instead to specify the contribution made by their co-authors in the end notes of the paper. Nature strongly encourages coauthors to specify their contributions:in this way.
If authors regard it as essential to indicate that two or more co-authors are equal in status, they may be identified by an asterisk symbol with the caption ‘These authors contributed equally to this work’ immediately under the address list. If more than three co-authors are equal in status, this should be indicated in the author contributions statement.”You might also be interested in this recent paper in EMBO Reports on the position of authors. (If you don’t have access to the journal let me know by email (m dot clarke at nature dot com) and I’ll obtain a copy of the paper for you.)
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Political motivations are also legitimate. Science is about funding, careers and publications as much as it is about knowledge and facts. If shared authorships are accepted, as Nature does occasionally, and can be motivated based upon listed author contributions, we should take them seriously. This means sharing responsibility and sharing credit.
If it is accepted that Jim and John have added equally (or at least comparably) to “this paper”, shouldn’t it be referenced accordingly?
For instance, not just “Author 1 et al” but “Author 1a, Author 1b et al”.If shared (first) authorship is accepted, should we act accordingly in displaying it, or is this one step too far? (Actually Nature is off the hook here, with a numbered reference style – It is the debate that matters).
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Often these days we see papers where multiple laboratory groups collaborate to work up ‘their story’. In these cases, it is quite often one individual from each group really does contribute as substantially to the manuscript as another from the other group(s). Or, in other cases, the graduate student or post-doc who initiated the work might have moved on to another position. If substantial revisions are requested by the referees during the manuscript review process, another individual(s) would then be asked to perform these additional experiments, which might then result in an ‘equivalent effort’ as that contributed by the ‘first author’. In such cases it would actually be unfair to those individuals to lessen their contributions by not acknowledging an equivalent ‘position’ in the authorship of the paper. In the former example, we also have published papers where ‘co-corresponding authorship’ is likewise acknowledged. As Maxine indicates, one way that NPG is encouraging authors to make their contributions to a given manuscript more transparent is to explicitly state ‘who did what’ in an authors contributions statement that is published with the paper.
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Thanks a lot for the detailed responses. I have read the post and the EMBO Reports article about the byline position of authors.
I understand that some research papers really need two first authors (for the reasons mentioned in the other posts), but there is a large middle ground. Is this middle ground getting smaller, as more journals require the specification of author contributions? Or should we stop believing that the publication record of an author can be measured exactly (with impact factors, Hirsch number and so forth) to be used for grant or job applications?
In the EMBO Reports article, 40% of promotion committee members believed that granting authorship to someone not meeting authorship criteria is common practice. Maybe this practice would be less common if promotion committees would find other ways to evaluate the scientific qualifications of an applicant.
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Hi,
interesting subject….do you guys really do experimental work?during my PhD I work in same project with a post-doc and the work involved 24/7 experiments …so we would rotate the experiments but doing the same stuff ..;sample preparation, data acquisition, data analysis…writing etc etc…the work with one person only would have been impossible or would have taken 10 years …
now tell me one thing …if a paper is published in a journal such as Nature, which per see can define a job position (no need to counter argue this..its a fact!!), which author would be first??...not even our boss could decide on that …not even myself, neither the post doc could come with arguments to be the first!!...we flipped a coin for JACS papers but for Nature no one wanted to flip a coin!!
guess what …Nature and Science setup the rules of hiring in science ..so get used to have that in the papers…. -
Would the “author contributions” statement help in this case, Peter? So that as part of the paper, the actual work done by each author is specified? I agree it is a very hard situation to be in—the order of authorship seems to be very much driven by the citation measure “industry”, which includes, of course, tenure and hiring committees and other parts of the scientific community outside the journal system.
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