Talk:Academic authorship

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This is good material, but I'm not sure this is the best place for it, and thought some discussion might help. Two concerns: first, in its current state this article seems to deal entirely with scientific publishing and has nothing to say about "academic" authorship more broadly. And second, perhaps this would work better as a section of academic publishing or scientific publishing? Is there really enough of a separate topic here for this to stand on its own as an article? -- Rbellin|Talk 18:48, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

I understand your concerns. Regarding the scope of the article, my personal knowledge limits what I can write about; there is no reason to think that the coverage won't be broaded by future contributors. I will attempt to shape the article so that it is clearer that what is currently written is not necessarily general to all academics. Regarding whether this topic is large enough to stand alone, I believe it is. I think it is already at the level of detail that if it were a section in another article, someone would suggest summarizing and moving the detail to a separate article. I'd prefer to give this article a chance; we could re-evaluate its state after a couple months and see if it is progressing towards becoming a good stand-alone article. ike9898 13:29, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

You're right, it's probably a good idea to leave the article here for a while and see if it grows. I am pretty sure that it will remain skewed toward scientific publication, simply because there's much more to say on the topic of authorship in fields where multiple coauthors are common. In most humanities fields and some social sciences, single authors on articles and books are the norm (and authorship simply means direct involvement in writing the piece), making most of the questions described in the article much simpler. -- Rbellin|Talk 14:12, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

After thinking about this a bit more, I'm inclined to favor (eventually) moving this article to scientific authorship and re-focusing it on scientific publication. I don't think there's any reason to pretend that this discussion applies across all disciplines, and most of these issues simply don't occur outside of the scientific disciplines in which multiple coauthorship is common. (It's still fine with me to wait a few weeks/months before making the move, but I don't think the article can be expanded to cover the humanities in a way that makes sense.) -- Rbellin|Talk 19:07, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

How about fields such as history? In an original research article, is it common to have multiple authors? ike9898 19:52, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Obviously my own experience is not universal, and when I have a moment I'll look for sources on the topic, but to my knowledge in many/most humanities fields co-authorship (a) is relatively uncommon and (b) basically always means that both authors (there are almost always only two) had a significant part in both the research and the writing of the piece. A more common form of collaboration is contribution to, or editing of, an anthology or collection on a shared topic, with each piece individually authored. -- Rbellin|Talk 20:25, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Possible light-hearted image

If you want to inject some relevant humor into the article, I suggest this comic. ^L_Wizard @ 16:22, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Sweet, but of course, it's copyrighted. ike9898 20:50, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Source for 'hundreds of authors' claim

I'd be interested to see a source (or examples) listed for the claim that "In genome sequencing and particle-physics collaborations, for example, a paper's author list can run into the hundreds." Orthabok 22:17, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I got that from the van Loon reference. ike9898 01:09, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

A practical example: selected PubMed example (Note: pseudo-randomly selected author) 217.122.83.79 11:22, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Holy crap! I wouldn't have believed it until I saw it myself. Do you think that in this sort of paper there is a lot of significance attached to one's position on the list? Is eight author much more important than 50th? ike9898 20:49, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, I know that in genome sequencing papers, the first one or two authors will be the principle investigators, the last usually the head of the department, and the authors in between are mostly laboratory technicians. I doubt there is an order in all those. 217.122.83.79 16:48, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

With these, it's usually some principals at the head and tail of the list. Then the "workers" are ordered first by institution, then alphabetical within the institution.Originalname37 (talk) 15:33, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Mathematics

This article completely lacks any discussion of priority disputes in math, e.g. Manifold Destiny; see also Grigori Perelman#Withdrawal from mathematics and Yau's criticism of Chinese academia for more anecdotal evidence. Pcap ping 10:34, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks for the leads. ike9898 (talk) 18:39, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
  • From reading through a little of what you linked to above, it became apparent to me that our article lacks any discussion of plagarism, which of course, is a concept closely linked to authorship. ike9898 (talk) 18:47, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Merge discussion

Although the article was tagged for merging, there was no discussion yet. I have removed the tag and redirected "Honorary Authorship" here, since all info in that article was already present here, too. --Crusio (talk) 18:27, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Article copies directly from source (i.e. plagiarism)

The section on Order of Authors in a List copies word for word from the Nature paper cited. Despite the citation, this constitutes plagiarism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chickadee84 (talk • contribs) 21:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Statistical Authorship Model

Please add a section on statistical authorship model. Aravind V R (talk) 03:52, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

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The issue of primary sources

Hello fellow Wikipedians (especially those watchlisting this article), Ater having read the article, I paradoxically believe that, although the references are numerous, diversified and come from peer reviewed academic journals, they arguably constitue a corpus of primary sources rather than secondary ones, as they are, in their majority, relevant to guidelines or policies of said journals and not a secondary analysis of the concept of academic authorship. As a matter of fact, I do believe that this article is very important because academi authorship is a very different concept from authorship in the litterary or publishing world. I also believe that the main relevant (secondary) litterature is to be found in History of Science journals (or books) and in Library and Information Science ones. They are the schoalrs specialized in assessing what the concept is. In a nutshell, I would suggest to consider Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison's "Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science" (ISBN 978-0-415-94293-5) and Biagioli, Mario, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmanse's "Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective" (ISBN 9780226907093), from the History of Science's point of view and a whole lot of literature in LIS (for example Adèle Paul-Hus, Nadine Desrochers, Sarah de Rijcke, Alexander D. Rushforth, (2017) "The reward system of science", Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 69 Issue: 5, pp.478-485) for a review that traces back to Robert K. Merton's system of ethos and reward. I can assign myself the task if it reaches consensus, and in the meantime, I would suggest to add a "secondary sources needed" template. Alexandre Hocquet (talk) 21:49, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

I think it is important to notice that many of the items in the reference list that may at appear to be journal articles, clearly are not if you click through and have a look. While most scholarly journals are nothing but peer reviewed research, publications like Nature and Science are really a hybrid of a journal and a magazine. A good number of the citations that look like research articles are in fact from the news, commentary, feature, or letters sections. The news items in particular are no different from a item in a newspaper, written by a reporter about scholarly work someone else did - very much a secondary source. Ike9898 (talk) 21:09, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Ambiguity

"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."

This phrase seems to confuse principal contributor with principal investigator (not the same thing). Should be clarified to say what is now accepted in cases where the PI *is* the principal contributor, do they go first or last? 80.189.45.169 (talk) 11:18, 26 November 2021 (UTC)