The Virus of Vagueness in Authorship

Abstract

Authorship is an essential component of assessing researchers' contributions to academia and science.But authorship lists are now recognized as a crude and vague way of communicating contributions because they are simply not very informative (Cutas and Shaw 2014).Generally, they inform readers about who made a substantial contribution to a research paper or project but provide no information regarding the extent or variety of that contribution (Shaw and Erren 2015).Because of this vagueness, readers often make assumptions about contributions based on the order in which authors are listed.But these assumptions often introduce further confusion because they are based on the fundamental assumption that all researchers use the same paradigms of authorship order.In fact, they do not, which makes the vagueness surrounding authorship even worse.Ambiguity concerning author input into published papers is recognized as a substantial problem within individual disciplines, but the problem is a particular issue in interdisciplinary publications, where any lack of contributorship statements will mean that the perceived contributions from each author will be dependent on the dominant paradigm used by each reader.A thought experiment can illustrate the problem.Let's imagine three researchers from different fields named Robert Roberts, James Jameson, and Charles Charleston write an interdisciplinary research paper together.The paper is read by many people, but we focus on three in particular: Ava, Anna, and Jana.They all enjoy the paper and are interested in collaborating with the person who had the idea for it.The order of authors given at the start of the paper is Charles, James, Robert.Ava works in the medical faculty and assumes that Robert had the idea, because he is last author and thus senior.These assumptions are mistaken: he might not be senior, and even if he was, that doesn't mean it was his idea.Anna works in philosophy and assumes that Charles did the most work and it was probably his idea too, because in philosophy authors tend to be listed in diminishing order of contribution.Here too, there are two assumptions: that he did more work than the second author, Charles, and that the person who did most work also had the idea.Finally, Jane is a biologist who always uses the principle that authors are listed alphabetically.She therefore assumes that the same has happened here and emails Charles (who happens to be the corresponding author) to ask who did what.All three readers are mistaken: it turns out that they all three authors contributed equally to the conceptualization and writing of the paper and that they decided on authorship order by randomization.In all these cases, a fundamental assumption about authorship attribution paradigms was made in addition to various other assumptions.And this is the problem with vagueness in authorship: vagueness about the system used to decide on author order, and about authors' specific contributions, seeds mistaken assumptions which further distort the intended message.

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