Markets for Scientific Attribution

Gans, Joshua S.; Murray, Fiona

doi:10.3386/w20677

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Growing complexity and multidisciplinarity as well as harsh performance evaluation policies render teamwork indispensable [1–4]. This raises normative questions about the distribution of credit and accountability among team members [5,6]. As more collaborators take part in a project, it becomes more difficult to negotiate who should and should not receive credit, and who should be held accountable for individual contributions and the integrity of the final work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific misconduct and accountability in teams

Hussinger

Pellens

2019

PLoS ONE

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Increasing complexity and multidisciplinarity make collaboration essential for modern science. This, however, raises the question of how to assign accountability for scientific misconduct among larger teams of authors. Biomedical societies and science associations have put forward various sets of guidelines. Some state that all authors are jointly accountable for the integrity of the work. Others stipulate that authors are only accountable for their own contribution. Alternatively, there are guarantor type models that assign accountability to a single author. We contribute to this debate by analyzing the outcomes of 80 scientific misconduct investigations of biomedical scholars conducted by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). We show that the position of authors on the byline of 184 publications involved in misconduct cases correlates with responsibility for the misconduct. Based on a series of binary regression models, we show that first authors are 38% more likely to be responsible for scientific misconduct than authors listed in the middle of the byline (p<0.01). Corresponding authors are 14% more likely (p<0.05). These findings suggest that a guarantor-like model where first authors are ex-ante accountable for misconduct is highly likely to not miss catching the author responsible, while not afflicting too many bystanders.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific misconduct and accountability in teams

Hussinger

Pellens

2019

PLoS ONE

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“…() – is the increasing prevalence of collaborative endeavour. An existing literature (Jones, 2009; Gans and Murray, ; Agrawal et al ., ) has attributed this trend to the increasing challenges associated with pushing further outwards at the existing frontiers of knowledge, and of producing work generally at the standards required for success in an increasingly competitive academic environment. Co‐authors bring, to a project, a wider pool of ideas and of specialist expertise, and scientific productivity therefore depends on co‐authors becoming efficiently matched.…”

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confidence: 99%

Lost in the Storm: The Academic Collaborations That Went Missing in Hurricane ISSAC

Campos

Leon

McQuillin

2018

Econ J

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By exploiting the cancellation of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, we investigate the role of conferences in facilitating academic collaboration. We assembled data sets comprising 17,467 academics, and in difference-in-differences analysis we find that the conference cancellation led to a decrease in individuals' likelihood of co-authoring an article with another attendant by 16%. Moreover, collaborations formed among attendants of (occurring) conferences are associated with more successful co-publications: an effect which is sharpest for teams that are new or non-collocated. Conferences seem to de-cluster the co-authorship network. Altogether, our findings demonstrate the importance of conferences in scientific production.

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