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The sequence of authors of scientific research papers
tend to be perceived to attribute the significance of
contribution of an author to a paper.
However, there is a significant number of cases, when
authors feel to have had equally much contributed to a
paper, and feel it is unfair to be
listed as
a second or third author. Moreover, the more such
equally contributing authors, the more unsatisfied
parties.
The "coauthor distribution" is a fairer replacement for
"author list". It is a combination of two lists:
an alphabetical list of authors, and a list of weights of
their contribution, defining a categorical multinomial
distribution. It inherently does not contain information
about order, but is flexible enough to include such
information if necessary.
Practically
http://i.mindey.com/prm/coauthors.pdf
Simply use alphabetical order for author list, use subscripts to denote the weights of contribution. [Inyuki, Apr 16 2012, last modified May 03 2013]
[link]
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For research papers where authors and works are merely cited, this would work when certain authors have been clearly plagiarised. Listing oneself as the author second to Noam Chomsky or whomever was the originator of the overarching thesis. |
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There are a dozen systems already used to try to address this
problem, none effective. |
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A lot of journals allow (or require) statements of contribution for all
authors. Many others allow statements such as "Joint senior
authors". And, in some disciplines where author lists are typically
large, alphabetized author lists are sometimes used. |
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The problems I see with this are that: |
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(a) if the paper is cited in another journal that uses the "Abel et al
2012" format, then "Abel" gets recognition regardless of his or her
contribution. |
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(b) authors will argue about what numerical value they are assigned,
just as much as they currently argue about author order. |
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So, I don't think it really helps to convert author contributions into
numerical values, compared to the established practice of
converting them into authorship positions. The former system is
just a more cumbersome equivalent of the latter, shirley? |
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Perhaps add the attribution list as a random
smattering of credits, like the signatures on the
American Declaration of Independence? |
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That seems to assign no particular weight to any
one author, except John Hancock, who took pride
of place and used up more space than anyone else. |
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It could even end up something like the weighted
representation of a Facebook "Yearbook" page, or
whatever it's called. |
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Leave the page blank and include a sheet of sticky labels with the names on. |
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How about if you used some sort of software that
allows you to selectively specify which author
contributed to which part of the paper. You'd then
assign each author a bit value of between 1 and n.
The text would be colored according to a palette of
2^n-1 colors, corresponding to which author(s)
contributed to each part. This would probably be
workable for up to maybe 5 or 6 different authors. |
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anagrams of the authors' names in crossword-puzzle format, complete with paper-relevant clues ? |
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[ !"#$%] the scientist formerly known as Zmendrick. |
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It's all good fun until "Prince" gets his doctorate. |
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On occasion I enjoy clicking on 1st, 2nd, or last author's
names on a paper at pubmed to read more about their
work. Alphabetizing would mess with that. |
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So if Johnson the undergrad spent two years in the library doing research, James the undergrad spent 1 year turning it into something resembling a paper, MacGuir the technician spent 6 months on a supercomputer crunching the numbers, and Professor Brown spent 2 months putting it all together into something worthy of publishing, who contributed the most? |
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The convention (at least in bioscience) is that the first author is the one who did most of the hands-on work, and the last author is the one who conceived the research. Positions near the front or near the back reflect diminishing contributions in each aspect. |
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