Astronomers could, for example, demand that any paper citing a result also cite the proposal that generated the enabling data. In this way, the proposal team co

Astronomers could, for example, demand that any paper citing a result also cite the proposal that generated the enabling data. In this way, the proposal team could still accrue credit for its work, even if it wasn’t the first to publish. Of all the ideas mentioned in the article, this sounds the most reasonable to me at first blush. IANAA though, so it's hard to get a sense of how big a deal it is to propose an observation. I would think the details of the proposal would matter a lot, no? That is, some observations are probably ones that more or less everybody sees as desirable, and there wouldn't be much "credit" to be earned from proposing those? I'd also be curious to know more about the extent to which it is likely that analyzing a particular bit of data is only likely to lead to one particular conclusion (that being whatever the proposing team had in mind). That versus the likelihood of, say, Team A proposing the observation to look for X, and then Team B coming and and finding Q (which has little or nothing to do with X). Any astronomers in the crowd here feel like chiming in?