Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views}

Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors. 

Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.  

However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These days labs write papers and not individuals. As a research scholar (pursuing your PhD) you are "contributing" to the work of another research scholar (in the same lab) and s\he is also "contributing" to your work and as a result you are an author in not only your own "own" work but also in the work being done by the other person. To such an extent that, if you are a recruiter, it gets difficult to know who contributed to what in that article. And this ambiguity grows when the lab is of some decent size (more authors per paper; more combinations).

No I am not talking about citations or the number of papers per person or what ever the measure we have to measure the outcome of research work. That is for another day, maybe.

During the course of a PhD,  the general trend was, two authors (the research scholar and the supervisor);  but today most publications have multiple authors working in similar areas belonging to the same lab under the same supervisor!

Authorship or Acknowledgement?

Having always taken pride in the belief that I have made sure that the research work that we do and publish in the lab has authorship based on the actual contribution by the member of the lab and not necessarily due to they being part of the lab. I was in for a shock, when one of my senior colleagues begged to differ saying that there were instances, within the lab, when this was not true. I was in for a pride-check or a shock. I am still trying to figure out what was the instance!

This came up when a request for authorship of research work based on a two or three days experimental effort was made to me and I thought that effort, at best, deserved an acknowledgement and not an authorship in the research work.

I have not looked at authorship or acknowledgment in any formal detail and made most of  my judgement purely based on a notion of "contribution" a person made to the research work being communicated. 

While I thought it was commonsense ... there is plenty of material on authorship, acknowledgement and order of authorship. I quote.

Determining the authorship of a work or the criteria for a person to be on the author list. 

Authorship

[A] According to ICMJE authorship recommendation be based on the following 4 criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

note that all the authors need to meet these 4 criteria to claim ownership of the article. Clearly denying #2 and #3 should not be used to disqualify someone from authorship. All individuals who meet the criterion #1 should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.

Acknowledgements 

According to ICMJE  contributors who meet fewer than all the 4 criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged.
 

Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are

1. acquisition of funding;
2. general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and
3. writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading.

Contributions  may be acknowledged individually or together as a group and their contributions should be specified (e.g., "served as scientific advisors," "critically reviewed the study proposal," "collected data," "participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript").

 
[B] According to Nature 


Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or 

1. substantial contributions to design of the work; or 
2. substantial contributions to the acquisition, analysis, or 
3. substantial contributions to interpretation of data; or
4. substantial contributions to the creation of new software used in the work; or
5. substantial contributions to drafting the work or substantively revised it

AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author's contribution to the study);

AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author's own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.

[C] Authorship (in natural sciences) should be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work according to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[D] Anyone listed as Author on an ACM manuscript submission must meet all the following criteria:
they have made substantial intellectual contributions to some components of the original work described in the manuscript; and
they have participated in drafting and/or revision of the manuscript and
they are aware the manuscript has been submitted for publication; and
they agree to be held accountable for any issues relating to correctness or integrity of the work.


Other contributors may be acknowledged at the end of the paper, before the bibliography.

While my own judgement was purely based on a notion of "{substantial} contribution" a person made to the research work being communicated. It is not far from what ACM or Nature of National Academy of Science put it more formally! At this point of time another crucial point crops up. What should be the order of authorship, especially if you have a team working on a problem!

Earlier there was no need to say anything specifically about contribution but today because of the increase in the number of authors per paper, we have a new trend "these authors have equal contribution" what ever that means!

This is also a point of discussion!

 Order of Authorship

According to  Editage  

1. The first author is usually the person who has made the most significant intellectual contribution to the work, in terms designing the study, acquiring and analyzing data from experiments, and writing the manuscript. 
2. The subsequent authors are usually listed as per their contribution to the research, starting with the one who contributed the most to the least.
3. The corresponding author is the one who receives all notifications from the journal including manuscript status, reviewers’ comments, and the final decision.  The corresponding author is often the group leader or a senior researcher whose contact address is not likely to change in the near future. 

In order to avoid any authorship dispute, it is a good practice to discuss authorship and the order of authors at the beginning of the project itself, and keep a record of each of the contributors involved throughout the project.

In Mathematics the authors are usually listed in alphabetical order (popularly called Hardy-Littlewood Rule).

In Computer Science in general the principal contributor is the first in the author list. However, the practice of putting the principal investigator last in the author list has increasingly become an accepted standard across most areas in science and engineering.

End Note

Clearly, while there is a reasonably good discussion about who can stake claim to an authorship, who should be acknowledged and what is the order of authorship.  But the description is so "loose" that each team has to use their commonsense judgement to decide how they interpret "contribution". 

The central problem remain in terms of what can be termed as "substantial contribution" which probably can not be quantified precisely!

Some Thoughts!

1. A junior member of the team who works on the experiments (and hopefully analyzes the results too) could be the first author. Most research in this digital era is based on the experiments and analysis of the results anyway!
2. The PI\supervisor (even, if has contributed significantly to the experimentation idea and details) becomes the second or the third author
3. Any authors of the paper must have made "substantial intellectual contributions" to some components of the original work described in the manuscript
1. How do we determine "significant" contribution?
2. Authors could be strongly encouraged to state their specific contributions before publishing a paper
3. This can determine the authorship order, else
4. We can follow the alphabetical listing of authors (as done in Mathematics!)
4. Should we encourage PI in the author list without specific contributions? Namely, discourage the practice of putting the principal investigator last in the author list has increasingly become an accepted standard across most areas in science and engineering.