I feel that the topic of authorship is very important and at the same time a challenging topic. It is a matter that significantly impacts our ability (at a community level) to recognize true research contribution. Mainly, I feel there are three reasons for this topic being a difficult one:
1) One being that if there are ’N’ people involved in a research, it would be really awkward to bring them all together and discuss on how much each one contributed and who all should get to be in the authors list and who gets to be the first author and so on. So, the decision would lie in the hands of a few, probably the Primary Investigator and the lead researcher. Often, I feel it is a confidence and trust in the lead researcher and the primary investigator that they will do the ‘right’ thing (ethical assignment of authorship). If they do not execute it ethically, or if there is a discrepancy or disagreement, it is a tricky situation to handle. It would be an uncomfortable topic to bring up and discuss but necessary at the same time.
2) Second, there is a vagueness about how much contribution is enough contribution / what could be considered as contribution worth authorship. Is it enough that some contribution is made in the form of running experiments? Can feedback be considered as a contribution worth authorship?
3) Third, is the problem of the first authorship bias. This I feel is a convenience (of referring to a paper by it’s first author) that has become a norm and a detrimental one at the same time (with respect to the commitment of recognizing true research contributions).
This got me thinking about what could be possible ways in which this can be tackled systematically. I feel, to avoid authorship conflicts and inaccuracies, we could try and incorporate these elements into common research practice:
- Avoid having an ordered list of authors under the research paper title (could be a drastic change but I feel worth considering), instead, have an ‘authors’ section where the authors and contributions are detailed in an unbiased, un-ordered fashion. This avoids the implicit bias of seeing the first author as the ‘main’/’sole’ author, also, at the same time it becomes evident what exactly each author has contributed.
- Instead of having a single ‘first author’ to whom the the whole research paper is attributed, have an author tier system, for example, three main researchers who can be collectively identified as the core contributors can be included in tier 1 (core authors; a limit can be set by the conference/journal for the number of authors in this tier). The contributors who have been valuable solely in terms of data collection and running experiments can be included in tier 2 (data & execution contributors). The contributors who provided value in terms of feedback, discussions and secondary ideas alone can be tier 3 (feedback and secondary idea contributors). Additionally, if the contributors who conceived the core idea (potentially ground-breaking idea?) are not the one’s who are leading the research, then there can be a tier ‘1b’ to include these contributors.
- This author tier hierarchy can be discussed in a meeting (with whomever included) or even through electronic communication and modified / collectively agreed upon since this will be less awkward than discussing who will be first author or discussing a descending order of authors for the work. This will also make more sense towards being able to recognize true research contribution.
- It can be made a practice (or even a necessity?) to include this author tier classification as a table in an ‘authors’ section in the manuscript.
- Last but not the least, when it comes to deciding whether a contribution is worth including or not it can only be up to the lead researchers and PI. Maybe we cannot clearly draw a line to say what can be considered as a contribution worth authorship but still, we as a community of researchers could work together to try and bring about a collective standard for what all can’t be considered as a contribution worth authorship. This could help towards constructive discussions and quicker / easier decisions on who should be included as an author and who can be included among those acknowledged.
That said, bringing things into practice is always the hard part but I feel if we are determined to improve the way authorship is handled, I feel we could try to talk openly about such possible methods to bring the matter into the spotlight, and also incorporate some methods like these towards improving the status-quo to an extend. This could in turn considerably improve the reliability with which the authorship / ownership of research generally gets handled. I would certainly love to hear what others among us think on these ideas, let me know in the comments!
