The authorship list in science: Junior physicists’ perceptions of who appears and why

Tarnow, Eugen

doi:10.1007/s11948-999-0061-2

Cited by 40 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…This simple formula might provide a measurement to the value of authorship, which has been a much debated issue in the ethics of scientific practice (Slone 1996;Tarnow 1999Tarnow , 2002. As a straight forward judgment, the number of citations can be taken as a basis of sharing credit.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correlation between impact and collaboration

Hsu

Huang

2010

Scientometrics

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We obtained data of statistical significance to verify the intuitive impression that collaboration leads to higher impact. We selected eight scientific journals to analyze the correlations between the number of citations and the number of coauthors. For different journals, the single-authored articles always contained the lowest citations. The citations to those articles with fewer than five coauthors are lower than the average citations of the journal. We also provided a simple measurement to the value of authorship with regards to the increase number of citations. Compared to the citation distribution, similar but smaller fluctuations appeared in the coauthor distribution. Around 70% of the citations were accumulated in 30% of the papers, while 60% of the coauthors appeared in 40% of the papers. We find that predicting the citation number from the coauthor number can be more reliable than predicting the coauthor number from the citation number. For both citation distribution and coauthor distribution, the standard deviation is larger than the average value. We caution the use of such an unrepresentative average value. The average value can be biased significantly by extreme minority, and might not reflect the majority.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correlation between impact and collaboration

Hsu

Huang

2010

Scientometrics

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“…For example, both Tarnow (1999) and Claxton (2005) discussed instances of "gift" authorships to maintain social ties or to acknowledge senior researchers who provided laboratory space or financial support.…”

Section: Reputationmentioning

confidence: 99%

What does it mean to be an author? The intersection of credit, contribution, and collaboration in science

Birnholtz

2006

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

141

140

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In this article, I draw on interview data gathered in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community to address recent problems stemming from collaborative research activity that stretches the boundaries of the traditional scientific authorship model. While authorship historically has been attributed to individuals and small groups, thereby making it relatively easy to tell who made major contributions to the work, recent collaborations have involved hundreds or thousands of individuals. Printing all of these names in the author list on articles can mean difficulties in discerning the nature or extent of individual contributions, which has significant implications for hiring and promotion procedures. This also can make collaborative research less attractive to scientists at the outset of a project. I discuss the issues that physicists are considering as they grapple with what it means to be "an author," in addition to suggesting that future work in this area draw on the emerging economics literature on "mechanism design" in considering how credit can be attributed in ways that both ensure proper attribution and induce scientists to put forth their best effort.

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“…On the other hand, there is evidence suggesting that students' earned authorship credit is sometimes underrepresented or outright denied by supervising faculty (Swazey, Anderson, & Lewis, 1993;Tarnow, 1999). Clearly, such outcomes are highly unethical as they rob the deserving student of their due credit.…”

Section: Guideline 25mentioning

confidence: 99%