The American Psychological Association and (I think) the American Medical Association, as well as other professional organizations have attempted to put out guidelines regarding what rises to the level of authorship and what does not.
As a fellow methodologist/statistician who leads a team of faculty, postdoc, and graduate and undergraduate students on a multi-year grant, I am very aware of this issue. OUr criterion for authorship is to err on the side of inclusion, which costs nothing, rather than risk exclusion, which costs everything.
Thus, we list authors who have contributed substantially to each product.
I have also recently had the experience of spending a great deal of time helping two colleagues write a large (> $5 million dollars) grant, only to be completely left out. No authorship credit, no inclusion in the budget, etc. That HURT a great deal. It really would not make a difference professionally, as I have enough to do on my own, and I already have tenure, but it HURT because I felt used and deceived. And it felt unethical. Those two would never have gotten (what is currently the largest grant in the history of this college) the grant without my help, but now they are perceived as having engineered the feat by themselves.
So, my bias is from the point of ethics, if someone has contributed to a paper, or presentation to the level that that paper or presentation could not have been written without them (e.g., like my graduate students who spend their existence gathering and entering data, but not necessarily writing it up) then I attempt to include them as co-authors.
I will also say that I think it is PARTICULARLY important that faculty be careful about dealing with their students, who are (a) not in a position of power with regards to determining rewards like this, (b) not experienced in the norms and culture of research, and ( c ) at a point in their careers where authorship is probably most important to be ethically handled.
I will, finally, say that little research these days is done in a vacuum-- the norm is team and group research, as it is in many fields (in physics, for examples, it is the norm to have up to a dozen co-authors of a paper). It is unethical to deny authorship, and it is ALSO unethical to award authoship if a person did NOT fundamentally contribute to a paper/project.
If you haven't hit DELETE by now, thank you for attending to my ravings.
Jason
Jason W. Osborne, Ph.D.
Director of Graduate Programs
PI -- IMPACT evaluation
Associate Professor of Educational Psychology
Office: Poe 602
Phone: (919) 244-3538 (cell)
Fax: (919) 513-1687
email: mailto:[log in to unmask]
My Web page: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jwosbor2/home.html
Educational Psychology Program web page: http://ced.ncsu.edu/ci/ed_psych.html
IMPACT web page: http://ced.ncsu.edu/impact/
Mailing Address:
Curriculum and Instruction,
Poe Hall 602, Campus Box 7801
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC, 27695-7801
>>> Jane Hutton <[log in to unmask]> 09/30/05 7:02 AM >>>
Dear Colleagues
I recognise that decisions by university management are not necessarily
supported by all academic staff.
Medical statisticians are familiar with being left off grant applications
and papers.
What do you think of Sheffield University's apparent definition of
plagiarism? See today's Times Higher, pg 8. Apparently, if three people
write a grant proposal, two people are free to submit it without any
reference to the other (main) author.
Even if I were the lesser author on a joint authored manuscript, I would
not expect the main author to submit in her own name alone.
I wonder whether Sheffield University will now complain about my
'distributing information, including a Times Higher article'? That
appears to be a reason for the recent suspension of Dr Blumsohn, the
academic who complained about plagiarism three years ago.
regards
Jane
Prof J L Hutton Department of Statistics
Chairman The University of Warwick
Email: [log in to unmask] Coventry
Tel: 024 7652 8357 CV4 7AL
Fax: 024 7652 4532 United Kingdom
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