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I'm glad you felt comfortable with that situation, but not all are like that. Sometimes the involvement is very nominal and unnecessary and there can be uninten

I'm glad you felt comfortable with that situation, but not all are like that. Sometimes the involvement is very nominal and unnecessary and there can be unintentional side effects that aren't always obvious, in a form of "attribution manipulation." I can think of situations where a researcher is basically "joining" projects whenever possible to attach their name to it in a form of branding. When a junior person comes along with their own original idea, even without the need of the senior person being involved, if the senior person is on the paper that senior person tends to "suck up" undue credit. I think sometimes the credit is deserved, but there are times when credit for papers tends to gravitate toward certain individuals who are better at managing public perceptions of citations. Gravity isn't a bad analogy: people with large citation counts tend to accumulate more, and perceived credit gets taken away from other individuals, even if subconsciously. I think it leads to a grossly distorted idea of how credit is distributed. I suspect this varies a lot but in my experience these large papers with many many researchers involved authorship is very murky in all sorts of ways. People with prominent authorships might not even deserve to be on the paper at all, and people who are lost in the sea might have actually made a significant contribution.

nextos 4y ago
I agree with you. PIs that have their name in so many articles are actually gaming the system. Nature and Science journals now require author contributions. Administration, fund acquisition, etc. are typically no longer valid to claim authorship. Cell is an exception and does allow this. So in my experience they simply force other coauthors to give them credit for study design when they did none.
tokinonagare 4y ago
Thanks for putting some realism in the thread. I've been a PhD student and the involvement of the lab head ranged from actually giving some research direction to doing jack shit depending on the paper and the people leading them. It was very obvious once when he green-lighted one of my paper for submission yet wanted to changed half of it when I made an internal presentation about it a week later. I challenged the thing one time to an intermediate supervisor (who where at least really contributing a bit) and I got bullshit excuses like "he's securing funding", "running the lab"... well at least not for my project since it costed nothing and I came with my own funding. At this point the toilet cleaning lady was contributing more to the paper because of how she allowed me to work in a clean environment. So I'm not surprised by Japan being over-represented like mentioned in the article. My lab explicit policy was "quantity over quality" written in a presentation given to new student. I know have a mental, logarithmic curve of contributions from authors: first made 90% of the work, second 9% and the following authors share the last 1%.

nextos 4y ago

I agree with you. PIs that have their name in so many articles are actually gaming the system. Nature and Science journals now require author contributions. Administration, fund acquisition, etc. are typically no longer valid to claim authorship. Cell is an exception and does allow this. So in my experience they simply force other coauthors to give them credit for study design when they did none.

tokinonagare 4y ago

Thanks for putting some realism in the thread. I've been a PhD student and the involvement of the lab head ranged from actually giving some research direction to doing jack shit depending on the paper and the people leading them. It was very obvious once when he green-lighted one of my paper for submission yet wanted to changed half of it when I made an internal presentation about it a week later. I challenged the thing one time to an intermediate supervisor (who where at least really contributing a bit) and I got bullshit excuses like "he's securing funding", "running the lab"... well at least not for my project since it costed nothing and I came with my own funding. At this point the toilet cleaning lady was contributing more to the paper because of how she allowed me to work in a clean environment. So I'm not surprised by Japan being over-represented like mentioned in the article. My lab explicit policy was "quantity over quality" written in a presentation given to new student. I know have a mental, logarithmic curve of contributions from authors: first made 90% of the work, second 9% and the following authors share the last 1%.