Timeline for Does significant editing of a paper with the possibility of minor contributions to its scientific content warrant co-authorship?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 24, 2014 at 12:53 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @Oswald: I agree: it is best for the contributor to decide whether the contributions were sufficient to merit coauthorship. About the rest: well yes, my rule of thumb is not perfect. But I did say submit to the same journal: if it is possible to remove 1/3 of a paper and not substantially decrease the overall quality, that's at least something to think about. But I think I should have included the proviso that if your contribution is not significantly less than any other author's, coauthorship is probably okay. Is it really a tricky situation if I contribute 5% of the content of a paper? | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 11:05 | comment | added | Oswald Veblen | I do think the scenario here is an example of what I think is the best practice in math: based on your contributions, although they were somewhat minor, you were offered authorship. This allowed you to make the personal decision about whether to be an author, rather than having that decision made for you. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 11:02 | comment | added | Oswald Veblen | I think your "subtracting" guideline is too severe. If three authors each, independently, write one-third of a joint paper, but it would still be publishable with only two of the three parts, your idea might suggest that none of them should be an author! Of course, if two of them write 95%, and one only 5%, then the situation is more tricky. Students in particular should pay attention to the possibility of "impostor syndrome" (cf. Wikipedia) in which they downplay their achievements and feel they couldn't really have contributed to a paper in a significant way. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 9:57 | comment | added | Moriarty | Although discipline is relevant to the question, it (ideally!) shouldn't be. For that reason, the omission that I'm in astronomy is deliberate. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 8:41 | comment | added | Faheem Mitha | "Senior" academics consider they are entitled to co-authorship on papers authored by "subordinates" under any circumstances, and are outraged if anyone suggests otherwise. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 8:40 | comment | added | Faheem Mitha | It seems the posture/attitude of mathematics with regards to authorship is admirably sane (I assume here you are to some extent speaking for prevailing practice in the mathematical community). This is also corroborated by discussions I've seen in places like Math Overflow. However, this is most definitely not the case in most academic areas. In most cases I'm aware of outside maths, the idea is indeed to get your name on as many publications as possible, by hook or by crook. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 6:04 | comment | added | ff524 | Note that in some fields, "having written a nice paper which does not have a faculty coauthor" does not carry more prestige for students than co-authoring with faculty. And in some fields, depending on your reputation (current or future) in a particular area, adding your name to a paper can increase its reputation and reach, in which case the other authors would benefit from it. So weighing the relative gain to you/loss to other authors is not always a good way to make this kind of decision. (I agree with the rest of this answer, though.) | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 5:47 | history | answered | Pete L. Clark | CC BY-SA 3.0 |