Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit

Key points • As the number of authors on scientific publications increases, ordered lists of author names are proving inadequate for the purposes of attribution and credit. • A multi-stakeholder group has produced a contributor role taxonomy for use in scientific publications. • Identifying specific contributions to published research will lead to appropriate credit, fewer author disputes, and fewer disincentives to collaboration and the sharing of data and code. Most researchers who have co-authored articles for publication, whether with one collaborator or twenty, have a story about wrangling over the order in which author names appear in the byline. And every journal publisher, large or small, deals regularly with cases of author dispute.1 In the 1930s, the average number of collaborators on scientific papers was roughly two, and this number remained steady for four decades.2 Authorship and collaboration have changed dramatically since the 1970s, and growth in multi-authorship has accelerated, driven both by academic reward systems and the ease of collaboration in the Internet age. By 2000, the average number of authors in articles published in high-ranking medical journals was seven. Before 1975, the maximum number of authors associated with any article in MEDLINE was 38,3 whereas it is not unusual today for scientific publications to list hundreds or thousands of authors.4 At the same time, interdisciplinary collaboration has increased, and other forms of scholarly output, including data and software, are now published in citable form.5 Some of these new scholarly collaborations, in particular citizenscience projects such as the Sloan Galaxy Zoo, can attract hundreds of thousands of named contributors.6 As the average number of authors on scientific articles grows, authorship-related problems, ranging from disputes to outright misconduct, mount. Why, then, do we persist with a practice of attributing scientific contribution that fails to capture the true nature of the underlying collaboration – or, more precisely, to capture who did what? It’s not as though the stakes here