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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

Living Science: Authorship then and now – eLife (Eve Marder | January 2022)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on September 10, 2022
Keywords: Authorship, Collaborative research, Good practice, Journal, Research results

The Linked Original Item was Posted On January 18, 2022

A word cloud around the concept of 'authorship'.

A researcher should only be an author on a paper if they have contributed to it in a substantive way.

I recently read Nancy Kleckner’s appreciation of her late husband, Guido Guidotti, who died in August 2021 after a long and distinguished career at Harvard University (Kleckner, 2021). I strongly recommend Kleckner’s article – which is complemented by contributions from a large number of Guidotti ’s colleagues and friends – whether or not you knew him and his work on the biochemistry and biophysics of a range of fundamental proteins and processes. His work illustrates brilliantly how previous generations of biochemists and biophysicists made discoveries without the benefits (and perhaps curses) of molecular techniques. Instead, they spent hours in cold rooms, and used brute force, cleverness, and hard work to purify proteins and characterize their properties and functions.

This item provides a useful discussion of whether we can credit as co-authors deceased peers who have made significant contributions to our development of an idea, but did not make a contribution to the research output.  This can be an important discussion in how to appropriately credit deceased collaborators. We have included links to three related items.

Guidotti also had interesting ideas on the authorship of scientific papers. Back in 1960, when he published his first paper, only those researchers who had had a significant role in generating the data were listed as an author, and it was not uncommon for the papers from PhD theses to have just one author because a PhD thesis was meant to be an independent piece of work. The community of scientists in any field of research was so small back then that people in the field would likely know that a first-time author was a PhD student in an established scientist’s laboratory.

In accord with this policy, my own PhD papers were single-authored, as were those of several of my lab colleagues. At first our thesis supervisor – a superb electrophysiologist called Allen Selverston – only signed papers from his lab when he had actually participated in collecting the data. However, shortly after I completed and published my thesis papers in the mid-1970s, it became almost unheard of to have single-authored papers from students and postdocs. So, in electrophysiology, as in other areas of biology, it became customary for lab heads to be the last author on papers from their lab. This progression has also been described explicitly for the field of meiosis (Zickler, 2020).

Living Science: Authorship then and now
A researcher should only be an author on a paper if they have contributed to it in a substantive way.

Related Reading

Research and publication ethics knowledge and practices in the health and life sciences: Findings from an exploratory survey (Papers: L.E. Bain, et al | July 2022)

A simple guide to ethical co-authorship – London School of Economics Impact Blog (Dr Helen Kara | March 2021)

CRediT Check – Should we welcome tools to differentiate the contributions made to academic papers? – LSE Blog (Elizabeth Gadd | January 2020)

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