A Modest Proposal on Authorship

Most biomedical scientists [see Discovering Biology in a Digital World for comment on field-specific practices] come across authorship conflicts; at least once or twice a career, often for each and every paper in labs which publish in high-impact journals. Most readers are familiar with this but in modern usage in many biomedical fields, the most senior scientist/PI of the laboratory/BigCheez holds down the last author position (and frequently “communicating author” designation) to indicate this high status. This is a BigDeal because in many situations this person is awarded the “real” credit for the paper and all postdocs/grad students/techs are assumed to be brainless sets of hands. Okay, I may be overstating but c’mon, the shorthand is to refer to a body of work as the result of the “SeniorAuthor” lab, instead of “the work of six different trainees”. Am I wrong? Controversy for this position can, however, arise when multiple labs are contributing data to a single paper. Usually the senior author would be the head of the first author’s laboratory. This brings us to the mythic FirstAuthor position, the source of much difficulty, bad feelings and even lawsuits. Rightfully so because in the career currency, this is the most important type of publication to list on the CV. Formally, the first author is supposed to be the person making the major contribution to the article, i.e., generated the most critical data, set tone for the direction and interpretation of the data and drafted most of the manuscript. Therefore, first authorship for postdocs and grad students is all critical in demonstrating that one is a seriously contributing scientist. Nobody criticizes a job or grant applicant for an insufficient number of second-author publications! Yet the formal description of first author is a bit passe. Particularly in high-impact journals, the data range across multiple disparate assays, models or techniques and it is hard to determine whose contribution was the most important. So authorship discussions can get…nasty.

A recent NatureJobs “Bricks & Mortar” piece suggests a nice rosy method for determining authorship/order on papers. The authors posit a discussion of potential co-authors where contributions (ideas, text writeup, figures, etc) are assigned merit ranks. Arbitrary weights are then supposed to generate a nice objective metric of contribution that might then be used to determine authorship. This is an unbelievable pile of junk that appears to have no connection whatsoever to the way authorships for Nature letters/articles are actually determined! Writedit labors under a similar misconception that mere discussion of contributions and relative merit can solve the problem as well. Don’t get me wrong. I also advocate being as open as possible about who is going to be first author on a given project right from the first discussions. But it is hard to predict where the science is going to take the project.

Ultimately it is impossible to know in advance who is going to be the part of the puzzle that kicks the project up to Nature/Science status. (or even publication status, for that matter.) And in many high-impact publishing labs, several years work from half a dozen postdocs/grad students gets squeezed into a single paper, often in a big rush at the end as the PI assembles the paper from the available projects/data. So how is credit assigned? What is most important? The knockout mouse/novel drug-toxicity model/human population/cognitive test? The phenotype/system/sub-analysis that generated the most-interesting result of the model? The series of follow-up manipulations in artificial gene expression systems/specific (ant)agonist ligands/neuropsych tests that provide insight into “mechanism”, “specificity” or the like? One gets into chicken-or-egg situations very quickly. A “discussion” amongst the “potential co-authors” then becomes self-interested argument for why each individuals’ data is the most important. This is why the PI makes the autocratic decision, in most cases. Thereby angering at least one of the contributors who feels screwed. Then, just to make things extra fun, the reviewers ask for several more experiments which may require the involvement of another co-author or two, or fundamentally change the “contribution” of an existing co-author.

A Modest Proposal

Why not let the reviewers decide importance of particular aspects of the manuscript and therefore the authorship order? Structurally it would be pretty easy since reviewers are already supposed to comment on what is most important and interesting about a given manuscript. The manuscript might include a list of authors with no indication of order, or with contributions listed. Might have to formalize the review process a bit but many journals already use a series of scaled queries on importance, quality, impact, etc so it should be a simple matter. Reviewers could then specify the reason a given manuscript should be published in a rank order. “The most important thing is that this gene has been deactivated….” or “The series of cell culture / gene expression experiments make this of “Nature” quality….” Etc. Once accepted, the final ranking of contributing elements to the paper could be identified by the Editor(s) as the factors leading to acceptance. Then the author order might be determined on the basis of contribution to this ranked list. Simple, eh?