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Jonathan Gootenberg

December 11, 2014

Medsci 300 Essay 1: Co-authorship and collaboration in lab

Assigning credit at the end of a scientific endeavor is never an easy task; the

perceived effort from different parties may cause conflicts over whom is the most in

ownership of a work. Recent developments in publishing, such as co -authorship, have

aimed to somewhat resolve this issue by attributing equal work to multiple parties.

However, as is often spoken in hushed tones in scientific circles, the two authors may not

in fact be held with equal regard, and when the paper is cited, there may only be one

name preceding the et al. Therefore, now more than ever are there conflicts over theordering of names on papers. I was able to witness this unfortunate event firsthand in my

lab, as there was a debate over the ordering of authors that would be assumed to be of

equal importance.

As a interesting aside, other disciplines such as computer science often do not

rank their au thors in terms of some nebulous metric of importance; instead, all authors

are listed alphabetically. While this ordering resolves all potential conflicts over the

ordering of authors, it raises new questions regarding what the minimal amount of effort

necessary to earn placement on a paper is: if one barely contributes to a paper of this

type, they would be ranked equally to the main driving author. Therefore, these

approaches do not completely remove all ethical issues with the attribution of credit;

instead, they change the playing field for assigning responsibility for work.

The development of the notion of co-authorship acts similarly to the method in

computer science, with the assumption that co-authors will be ranked equally or even

perhaps alphabetically. However, co-authored papers are often cited by the first -first

alone, and the implication of papers is that more important co-authors are first.

Furthermore, papers with an excessive number of first authors, such as three or four,

are viewed with a certain amount of skepticism.

A recent paper that I was a part of writing provides a perfect example of the issues

of co-authorship, and authorship in general. The paper, which was initially submitted

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with three co-first authors, was returned from reviews with a substantial amount of

additional work required. The initial agreement that the authors had to assign the credit

was a general distribution according to both intellectual and effort contributions.

However, one of the authors, the second author, could not be present for a fair amount of

the post-review revisions, due to both other project commitments and the fact that they

were out of the lab for quite some time. Therefore, the third author on the paper, who

worked on and wrote much of the reviews which resulted in a paper with substantially

more data than the initial submission suggested switching with the current second co -

first to distribute the credit. This move was supported by the first-first author, who

believed that the previous third author was deserving of an increased amount of credit.

However, the existing second author was staunch about his role in the project, citing his

role in the initial phases of the project and the importance of his intellectual contributionsto the paper. Ultimately, a change in the authorship was not done, and the list remained

how it was. This situation shows the ridiculousness of the notion of equal contribution of

co-authors, and the unfortunate results the field.

In the future, more precise allocation of work and better record keeping may

allow for more quantitation of contribution, but the ideal scenario would be a

movement away from petty squabbles over authorship and the development of more

holistic measures of scientific accomplishment. However, it is a fact that when operating

under constraints of credit, both for the current assignment as well as future historical

assessments, there will never be a complete resolution.