Authorship Wackaloonery
December 22, 2009
This shit cracks me the fuck up:
Carbonic anhydrases are upstream regulators of CO2-controlled stomatal movements in guard cells
Honghong Hu1,5, Aurélien Boisson-Dernier1,2,5, Maria Israelsson-Nordström1,3,5, Maik Böhmer1,6, Shaowu Xue1,4,6, Amber Ries1, Jan Godoski1, Josef M. Kuhn1 & Julian I. Schroeder1
* * *
5. These authors contributed equally to this work.
6. These authors contributed equally to this work.
Three co-first authors and two co-fourth authors!?!? I am trying to imagine the negotiation between the Schroeder, Bohmer, and Xue:
Schroeder: Xue, where are those fucking PCRs!?!?
Xue: I’m not giving them up unless you make me fourth author!!! Fifth authorship is for fucking LOSERS!!!
Bohmer: No fucking way!!!! I’M FOURTH AUTHOR!!111!!!ELEBVENYT!!111!!
Schroeder: Ah, you fucking guys are a pain in my fucking ass! OK, how about this? You can be co-fourth authors. Happy now?
Xue: Ok, boss.
Bohmer: Ok, boss.
Schroeder: Great. Now get the fuck out of my office, you ridiculous fuckwads.
DrugMonkey 
December 22, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I believe the interpretation is intended to be three co-equal first authors, and two co-equal second authors. 🙂
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December 22, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Wait. If the first three are tied for first author, doesn’t that make those two donks tied for second author? No?
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December 22, 2009 at 1:29 pm
How fucking dumb are you people?? Do you understand what the ordinals first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, etc, even mean??
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December 22, 2009 at 1:38 pm
No, dude. Can you explain it a bit more?
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December 22, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Fuck you, cockwad.
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December 22, 2009 at 2:18 pm
DrugMonkey Sciblog: To Be Or Not To Be A Tabloid, that’s the question!
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December 22, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Possible various reactions:
1. Wow, this blog is edgy and cool because it has lots of swearing!
2. Wow, this guy is really upset, to the point of apopletic over a minor issue in life! No one’s kid died, there is no less of career, education, respect…but golly, gee willickers this is serious stuff…lives are altered, history is changed! Time is warped! Anarachy is at hand!
3. What a wackaloon.
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December 22, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Simply hilarious. I like the last line the best.
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December 22, 2009 at 5:35 pm
or, as Cartman would say: “What’s the big fuckin’ deal, bitch? fuckitty, fuckitty, fuck fuck fuck.”
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December 22, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Seriously, I thought Sol was dead or had some kind of anal cancer. Where you been Soly-Poo?
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December 22, 2009 at 8:03 pm
And the arsemonkey journal let them do it too.
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December 22, 2009 at 9:58 pm
I believe the difference lies in the concept of sets. There is a primary author set, comprised of three people and there is a secondary author set comprised of two people. Then there is the fuckwad set. I’ll leave it to the readers to determine how many people are in that one.
Let. It. Go.
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December 23, 2009 at 8:18 am
Fuckwads publishing papers. Love it, thank you.
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December 23, 2009 at 7:52 pm
who cares???? (except the authors and the bloggers)
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December 23, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Anon Dude, a lot of people read this shit because they are involved in academics, etc and this resonates with them. Having been fucktillionth author on a paper once and watching the discussions pre-pub, I’m amused.
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December 23, 2009 at 8:22 pm
I can’t believe these fucking ingrates do not appreciate the comedic genius of my dialogue!
“Fifth authorship is for fucking LOSERS!!!” is comedy motherfucking gold!
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December 23, 2009 at 8:36 pm
No one gives two fucks if you’re fifth author except you and your grandmother. Might as well put it on the fridge next to the puppy you colored in kindergarten.
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December 23, 2009 at 9:18 pm
I initially laughed at what I assumed was an amusing comedy sketch but some of the earlier commenters have made me realise that this was clearly intended as serious social commentary (and, furthermore, that it fails in this regard).
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December 23, 2009 at 10:33 pm
The important question is what about Ries? Did she contribute more than Godoski, and so deserve sixth (or is it third?) authorship, or did she screw Godoski out of rightful sixth (third) authorship? Or should they really be co-sixth(third) authors, but Godoski was just too shy to speak up for pride of place? These questions are keeping me up tonight. Because if fifth place is for fucking losers, what about seventh (fourth) place? Srsly?
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December 24, 2009 at 12:00 am
MonkeyPox, I’m the “Anon Due”, and FYI, I’m an associate professor so I think it’s safe to say that I’m “involved in academics”. I’ve seen my fair share of squabbles over authorship and been dragged into it too on more than one occasion. And yes I have been a “fucktillionth author” on papers too. And thus I say that there comes a point where one has to draw the line and say this is reaching the point of absurdity (a zillion co-first authors? a zillion co-fourth authors??, squabbling over fourth versus fifth authorship??) – at that point, who the hell cares??
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December 24, 2009 at 12:06 am
That’s why my little sketch is so fucking hilarious!!! What the fuck is wrong with you people!?!?!? Have your brains been so fucking addled by shitty sitcoms–“Heh, heh. Dad, his mom is so hot!!! Yeah, heh, heh. Invite the kid over for dinner and when his mom drops him off, I’ll act like a ridiculous stupid endearing asshole and she’ll totally fall in love with me!”–that you can’t even recognize real humor anymore??
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December 24, 2009 at 10:59 am
I LMAO at this. Sometimes, CPP, you are the funniest thing on the web! Because my lab is doing something similar RIGHT NOW!! (I am none of the authors, FWIW). What antipodean said- the arsemonkey journal is letting them do it, too. Oh and I think the co-second author thing is what was intended (2nd author is bait; 4th author is poor consolation), but I agree that it’s fucking redonkulous.
Having written all that, on another sip of coffee and 30 seconds more consideration, I bet I know what happened. I bet this was two papers merged together, hence the co-co- nonsense.
Oh, I love the opposite of least-publishable-unit. What is that called? Winner-take-job?
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December 24, 2009 at 11:35 am
Joke or not, what really clear is that the majority of you, wannabes scientists, care more about your personal image than about the science you do. Eugene Garfield, when he begun his Science Citation Index more than 50 years ago, never imagined that his idea would evolved into a scale by which a bunch of asshole wannabe scientists grade themselves. You are for science what the irresponsible subprime mortgage borrowers are to the US economy, a bunch of pompous asses holding their index finger up high, believing that they are the best scientists in the world simply because you have managed to publish your shit in a X journal with high IF as first authors. I really pity you, but also worry about the future of scientific research when its scientists are represented by the like of you.
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December 24, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Shitlin, you crack me up! Now go bother your grandchildren, you senile old fuck.
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December 24, 2009 at 2:10 pm
To top it all, there are those among you who pretend to be serious scientists and yet, they are following their undeclared infantile leader, CPProfane, cheering him every time he farts, while attempting to imitate him. What a miserable bunch of losers.
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December 24, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Even then, you just called him “Sonny”.
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December 24, 2009 at 4:26 pm
MonkeyPox,
As a follower of your infantile profane leader, you surely do not expect me to take you too seriously, do you? You all are just a bunch of children who use their annonymity to play with their own feces, smearing themselves with the stinky stuff and enjoying it so much. How the hell do you find time to play with shit when you suposedly have NIH grants to tend for and important research results to publish in Nature, Science and Cell?
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December 24, 2009 at 4:45 pm
HAHAHAHAHA!!!
Alterkakers always think young people are a bunch of children!!!!
“Get offa my lawn!!!”
Why don’t you go back to looking for you “any” key.
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December 24, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Douchelington, you have obviously forgotten what it’s like to not be a gibbering senile old fuck. Did your grandkids throw your sorry ass out of the family room again?
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December 24, 2009 at 5:55 pm
ShmokPox, Really? You don’t think that your developmental age could be gleaned from your infantile comments?
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December 27, 2009 at 12:05 pm
This shit is fucking funny. A bunch of whiny pussies arguing about co-fourth authorships (on a generally uninteresting piece of shit hybrid paper no less) is hilarious. Its too bad a couple of cock nuggets are getting butt hurt about the word fuck (then going into long protracted descriptions of their shitty-children fetish) and generally acting like they need their goddamn colostomy bags changed.
On another note wasn’t this authorship bullshit the same kind of crap that Weisel was complaining about a couple of months ago?
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December 27, 2009 at 12:32 pm
DM–sorry to see you fell into the trap. As a science journalist, I once complained that with 6 (or 20 or 50) authors on a paper, there was really no way to know who actually wrote it. I was told, repeatedly, heatedly, that “this authorship bullshit,” as the above poster quaintly puts it, is, to scientists, the least relevant thing about a paper. This is odd, since the paper itself is often the ONLY part of the research work designed to communicate coherently with the science community as a whole.
Those of us who might want to ask the AUTHOR a question feel somewhat differently about all this. I have a feeling some of this reticence is due to the increasing use of ghost writers for scientific papers. In that case, the true answer to the question of which scientist among the 6 actually composed sentences that appeared in the final published paper is: none of them.
What’s wacky is not pointing this out; what’s wacky is the increasing trend toward meta-authorship: nobody wrote it. Everybody wrote it. It wrote itself. Just look at the data and don’t worry your pretty little head about who actually turned it into comprehensible (sometimes) prose.
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December 27, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Reading most of the comments to this post makes me realize why the future of science in the US is in real trouble. Too many imature, developmentally arrested Ph.D.s are still playing in the school yard, pulling girls’ hair and bullying other boys around.
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January 2, 2010 at 9:22 am
Rivlin, you have no sense of humor. Too many Rivlin comments makes DrugMonkey a dull blog.
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January 2, 2010 at 9:39 am
bioephemera,
What about your sense of humor?
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