Nautilus

Raf Aerts of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven writes in Correspondence in Nature (453, 979; 2008):
Several Correspondences, including 'Give south Indian authors their true names' (Nature 452, 530; 2008) and 'Name variations can hit citation rankings' (Nature 453, 450; 2008), have illustrated difficulties in identifying authors and their papers, citations and h-index.
In an academic world in which decisions on promotion and funding often depend on the applicant's scientific impact, an incorrect publication or citation record in an online database can be very inconvenient. Scopus and Thomson's Web of Science, which make available abstract and citation databases, acknowledge the issue and have come up with solutions: the Author Identifier and ResearcherID, respectively.
These systems assign an identifying code to each author. Unfortunately, a single author can have more than one Author Identifier in Scopus (I am cryptically known as 7006716603 and 16551750300). And as only invited researchers can register for a number, ResearcherID is not yet used as a unique author key in the Web of Science — making it difficult to differentiate me from a highly cited ecologist from the Netherlands, despite the 'Distinct Author Sets' feature.
If it is possible to have DOIs for objects (or, so they say, enough IPv6 addresses for every molecule on Earth), why is it so difficult to implement DAIs for authors?
(See the author and reviewers' website for more about DOIs, or digital object identifers.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 24, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the Editorial in the June issue of Nature Nanotechnology 3, 309 (2008), "when the papers published so far in Nature Nanotechnology are classified according to the country in which the corresponding author was based at the time, we find that 47.6% of them come from the US, followed by 8% from the UK, 7.4% from Japan and 6.7% from Germany.
Classifying papers according to the affiliation of the corresponding author is clearly an approximation, but given the fact that papers can contain ten or more authors with affiliations in three or more countries, it is necessary to make such approximations if we want to understand which areas of the world are strongest" in a particular discipline.

The Editorial goes on to explain some of its "authorship" assumptions used for its analysis of several journals that publish high-quality research in the nanotechnology, leading to the conclusion that "although the number of nanotechnology papers published by Chinese researchers is increasing rapidly, the US and Europe continue to lead in terms of quality."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 12, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Biji T. Kurien of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation writes (Nature 453; 450; 2008):
The Correspondence 'Give south Indian authors their true names' (Nature 452, 530; 2008) and earlier News Feature 'Identity crisis' (Nature 451, 766–767; 2008) are highly relevant to calculations of PubMed citations and h-index (the number n of a researcher's papers that have received at least n citations).
For example, I used to use the south Indian form of my name: T. Biji Kurien, with Biji being my personal name. I have seven publications cited incorrectly in PubMed as being by 'Kurien, T. B.', 'Bijikurien, T.' or 'Kurien, B.'. Four of these entries were cited often enough to be counted towards my h-index computation. As I had by then changed my name to conform with Western style, these publications unfortunately do not appear in the Web of Science or PubMed under my current name format. Consequently, my h-index ranking has fallen by 25% .
It is of paramount importance to adhere to a consistent name pattern right from the start, in order to maintain a correct list of publications in the public databases as well as the right h-index rankings.

Prabhu B. Patil, of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, writes in the same issue of Nature (453, 450; 2008):
The Correspondence 'Give south Indian authors their true names' (Nature 452, 530; 2008), incorrectly states that people from the south do not traditionally have surnames.
I am from southern India and have a proper surname — as do all the families in my region. Besides Patil, surnames such as Naidu, Reddy, Rao and Gouda are common in the different states of southern India. One of the authors of the Correspondence has the surname Kutty.
Surnames have widely fallen into disuse because our fathers and forefathers avoided using them to prevent discrimination on grounds of caste.
It doesn't make sense in this case to use only an author's first name in scientific publications and to devise a special system to accommodate a different naming format. Instead, editors should encourage these authors to revive the use of their surnames.

Comments are welcome here and at Indigenus, the blog of Nature India.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 04, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Citation analysis | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Biotechnology's May Editorial (26, 476; 2008) adds its perspective to previous discussion in Nature, Spoonful of Medicine (the blog of Nature Medicine) and at Nature Network about 'ghost authors' on clinical research papers from Merck. According to Nature Biotechnology, papers from the pharmaceutical industry are being unfairly stigmatized because of one company's past poor publishing practices. Nature Biotechnology welcomes some recommendations made in an Editorial about the affair in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (299, 1833–1835; 2008), such as conflict of interest and 'author contribution' statements, but goes on to add: "the JAMA editorial then goes too far, leaping on the findings to make recommendations that are unwarranted, not to say discriminatory, against the body corporate. In recommendation 4, for example, the editors imply that any research associated with "industry" is potentially tainted. In essence, the editorial calls for journal editors to take into account all financial support and financial relationships when deciding whether to publish a manuscript at all." After providing additional examples, the Nature Biotechnology Editorial concludes:
"Ghostwriting and guest authorship run contrary to the Corinthian spirit of scientific publishing. Although that spirit may have disappeared since the days when science was the exclusive province of the enthusiastic and moneyed amateur, companies that use ghostwriters and rubber-stamp experts as authors of their papers reinforce the impression that industry's only interest in publishing is to dress up marketing as science. But the editors of JAMA and other journals would do well to focus on content, not process. JAMA's attack casts a cloud over the entire industry. Stigmatizing any paper that comes from the private sector on the basis of an analysis of one company's poor publishing practices over five years ago is not only unjustified, it is discrimination pure and simple."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 21, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

The eternal question of authorship is in the frame in a News story in the current issue of Nature (452, 791; 2008), in which it is reported that thousands of of documents relating to Merck’s withdrawn painkiller rofecoxib (Vioxx) were were reviewed by medical researchers, and seem to show Merck’s extensive involvement in ghost-writing and ‘guest authorship’ of research and review papers. The results of the analysis are published by J. Ross et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association (299, 1800–1812; 2008).
By omitting the names — or downgrading the involvement — of drug-industry writers, and adding the names of academics who were not substantially involved in a paper, the industry’s role in research may be concealed. And doctors may be misled over the independence of the work. For example, one of the Merck-held documents lists a number of clinical trials in which a Merck employee is to be author of the first draft of a manuscript. However, when these trials were published, in 16 of 20 of the articles an external academic is listed as first author. Merck denies these allegations.
See also Spoonful of Medicine, the blog of Nature Medicine.
There is further discussion of the JAMA article, and the implications for authorship credit, at Nature Network.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 21, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (1)

Juan-Carlos Lopez discusses the publication process from the authors' perspective in a couple of posts at Spoonful of Medicine, the blog of Nature Medicine. First, he shares some data to show that the Nature journals are not biased in favour of authors based in the United States. The data shown are the ratio of submitted to published papers as a function of country. Take a look.
In a subsequent post, Juan-Carlos describes a talk he gave recently in Madrid, at which he showed these data (and received some puzzling feedback), and also was asked questions about open-access publishing. He writes: "It was fascinating to see how difficult it was for some people to understand that scientific publishing costs money, and that there are different models to recover your costs -- the author-pays model, the subscription model, and everything in between ...... as there are different models, publishing groups ought to choose the model that works best for each of them. In our case, the subscription-based model is the only one that seems viable for the time being. How difficult is it to get this point?"
There has been some discussion related to this topic over at Nature Network in the past week, summarized here at the blog Gobbledygook. Part of this discussion involves the latest NIH (US National Institutes of Health) policy on self-archiving of research that it has funded, requiring deposition of the author's version into the PubMedCentral database 12 months after the journal's publication date. For authors who aren't sure how this affects them when submitting to Nature journals, the new NIH policy is consistent with Nature Publishing Group's existing policy, which states: "When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 16, 2008
Categories: Access, Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Raf Aerts, on his Nature Network blog African Blog of Ecology, writes about the relentless increase in the number of multi-authored manuscripts. He reproduces a graph from the magazine Science Watch (November/December 2007 edition) which tracks papers grouped into four tranches of more than 50, 100, 200 and 500 authors. Between 1993 and 2003, the numbers of papers with these large numbers of authors were fairly stable, but after that time, the numbers in all categories increased significantly (to 2007). Raf Aerts writes:

"But then came the cracker: in 2000 there was a report with 918 authors, and the current record holder is physics paper published in 2006… with 2512 authors. Imagine all these authors track-changing the manuscript!"

At Nature, and many other journals, the editors ask one author to coordinate revisions and changes between all coauthors, and convey those to the journal on behalf of all of them. The challenge for the poor corresponding author must be quite significant on occasion.

Why do papers need so many authors? Modern, "big" science means that a paper can take years to gestate, involving researchers at many centres, international facilities (for expensive equipment, for example), and complex software. Martin Fenner, in a comment to Raf Aert's post, writes: "In my last published paper I have 82 coauthors, my personal record. The paper is the result of a consensus conference on the management of testicular cancer."

The papers tracked by Science Watch do not cover the "ten-author" paper in which a couple of professors might use their seniority muscle to add their names to an author list even though they made no contribution to the intellectual or physical effort of creating the paper. Is this type of paper making more of a mockery of the concept of "authorship" than the several-hundred author collaboration? How else would these researchers receive deserved credit for their work?

The Nature journals appreciate the problems, but wish authors to be transparent with their readers -- as we do not want to support the practice of honorary authorship, while being sympathetic to genuine collaborations. We encourage coauthors of a paper to specify their contributions to the work, in a statement in the acknowledgements. Our policies, as well as (free-access) editorials in our journals on this topic, are gathered at the Author and Reviewers' website; and our discussions of authorship on Nautilus are gathered under the tag "authorship", which you can see listed by clicking on this link. We welcome your views, which can be made online as a comment to any of these posts.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 28, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chinese authors are publishing more and more papers, but are they receiving due credit and recognition for their work? Not if their names get confused along the way. Jane Qiu investigates these, and other questions, in a Nature news feature in the current issue of the journal (Nature 451, 766-767; 2008). The article covers the huge problem of how to distinguish between Asian researchers, given the vast numbers of people sharing relatively few surnames. The problem is particularly challenging in the publishing sphere, not only in identifying an author correctly in citation databases and other indeces, but for editors in choosing appropriate peer-reviewers. Asian researchers suffer in being hampered from full participation in the international scientific community, for example they are less likely to be invited to contribute to conferences, to be successful in grant applications or to win awards.
The news feature provides a clear overview of these issues, and more, from a range of perspectives. Some journals have begun to provide author names in original (not Latin) characters, and there are various initiatives to provide unique author identifiers. At this stage, however, there is no consensus as to the best way to proceed: there are problems of technical compatibility between publishing, database and indexing systems, of agreement on universal standards, and other challenges, such as the high mobility of scientists, making it difficult to track the author of several publications.
Nature Network has a forum "What's in an Asian name?", in which several Asian and other researchers provide their perspective of this challenging issue for publishers and database curators. A Nautilus post last year highlighted the efforts of the Human Frontiers Program to help Japanese and other Asian scientists to improve their international visibility.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 19, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Format, Publishing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Materials gets to grips with the issue of authorship this month, in a freely available Editorial (Nature Materials 7, 91; 2008) about international guidelines that define authorship as "limited to those who have made a significant scientific contribution to the concept, design, execution, or interpretation of the research study". This definition, used by many journals in their author guidelines, becomes imprecise in some circumstances, as identified in the Nature Materials editorial:
"A classic example is the case in which an experimental facility has been used to obtain some of the data. Without the work of scientists employed to run that facility those results could not be obtained. But is their contribution to the specific work enough to warrant authorship, or would acknowledgements be more appropriate? What about the director of the facility? Should the contribution of technicians warrant authorship in general? What about collaborators that helped obtain funding that was used for the work? And what about reviewers, who in some cases substantially help improve a paper, but whose contribution is mainly editorial?" The Editorial points out the difficulties in implementing clear-cut rules, but urges institutions not only to clarify and unify codes of conduct, but also to ensure that the scientists they employ and/or fund appreciate their importance.
It is the policy of the Nature journals to encourage co-authors of papers to specify their individual contributions. Full details are provided at our authors' and reviewers' website.
The full-text of the Nature Materials Editorial can be read here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 04, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Any issue of Nature today has nearly the same number of Articles and Letters as one from 1950, but about four times as many authors. The lone author has all but disappeared. In most fields outside mathematics, fewer and fewer people know enough to work and write alone. If they could, and could spare the time and effort to do so, their funding agencies and home institutions would not permit it." So writes Mott Greene of the University of Puget Sound in his recent (single-author, naturally) Nature essay "The demise of the lone author" (Nature 450, 1165; 2007).
Professor Greene goes on to discuss how this practice is affecting, and will affect, the system of awarding credit for work done, predicting that "in those fields where multiple authorship endangers the author credit system, we shall soon see institutionally initiated restriction on the number of authors. Paradoxically, this is likely to be endorsed by all parties as preferable to cinema-style specification of who actually did what. Most will prefer full credit for a few papers to little or no credit for many, considering where it matters most: university committees in charge of tenure, promotion and salary increments based on scholarly production. Given Nature's role in determining, as well as chronicling, how science is reported (see Nature 450, 1; 2007), interested parties could watch these pages to see whether a trend towards more restricted authorship is emerging."

Nature's policy on author contribution statements is here, and was introduced in an Editorial here.
Professor Greene's article is also available on the beautiful website that celebrates the history of the journal Nature.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 10, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Careers, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ai Lin Chun, one of the editors of Nature Nanotechnology, writes about the column in the journal Top Down Bottom Up (example at this link), which highlights the multidisciplinary nature of nanoscience and nanotechnology by going “behind the scenes” to explore how collaborations occur and work together. Collaborations could be between two or more different disciplines (for example, physical scientists and biomedical researchers) or between academic departments and industrial researchers. The name of the section is intended to suggest how researchers with different expertise come at a problem from different directions.
If you have an interesting collaboration, please drop Ai Lin a line at her Nature Nanotechnology network group -- and she might pick your collaboration to highlight in the journal.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 28, 2007
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Kenward starts a debate in Nature Network's science writers' group called Science experiments in accessibility, in which he highlights the journal Science's trial project of starting each Research Article with a one-page author's summary. Michael sees two benefits for science writers: one, to help authors to produce accessible summaries; and another to use the summaries to write more easily and confidently about the research.
Following this post is an online discusssion about the benefits to the reader of different types of summary which you may find stimulating, and to which you are welcome to contribute, or comment here. Typical summaries provided by journals range from News and Views-style editorials (articles by independent scientists in the field about a new finding), to short author summaries, to "making the paper" (interviews with an author featured on Nature's author page in the journal every week), to "inside the paper" (editors' accounts of how the paper evolved from submission to acceptance during the peer-review process) to one-paragraph editors' summaries, to science journalism, to blog posts, to podcasts. What kind of reader finds what kind of summary most useful? Would authors welcome the additional task of writing one-page summaries?

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 21, 2007
Categories: Author services, Authorship, Communication, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article neatly titled the write position, Jonathan D. Wren et al. in the current issue of EMBO Reports ( 8, 11, 998-991; 2007 ) survey perceived contributions to papers in biomedical fields based on byline position and number of authors. They undertook the study because publications in peer-reviewed journals are a major criterion for assessing scientists for promotion, tenure or funding, yet not all authors are viewed as equal contributors. Qualitatively, those listed first or last in the byline are generally apportioned more credit for the work than middle authors, but it is not known exactly how much authors are perceived to contribute from their byline position.
To attempt a quantitative assessment, the authors surveyed chairpeople of promotion and tenure committees, and found that respondents felt that the first author in a three-person byline had made the greatest contribution to the work performed, whereas the last author deserved most credit for both the initial conception and supervision of the project. There was no significant difference in three-author compared with five-author bylines for the credit apportioned to the last author for initial conception, work performed or supervision.
In addition, nearly half of the repondents agreed that granting authorship to someone who does not meet journal authorship criteria is common. Adding authors to a publication apparently does not affect the relative overall credit afforded to the last author, but the perceived contributions of all other authors suffer a drop in value.
For details of survey response rates and percentages, as well as further information, please see the full report at the EMBO Reports website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 12, 2007
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (1)

As part of our ongoing discussion about the accountability of authors and co-authors (comments are still very welcome), I decided to take a snapshot look at the popularity of Author Contributions statements in Nature. We strongly encourage authors to make these statments, specifying the ways in which the authors contributed to the paper, but we do not make it mandatory. Should that change? Part of the answer to that question lies in how useful authors find the idea. So it is of interest to note that in the past three or four issues of Nature, about half of the Articles and Letters (primary research) carried contributions statements. Here are some examples, all from the same issue of Nature (1 November 2007):

J.L., J.R.S. and J.W.L. conceived the Brainbow strategies. J.R.S. and J.W.L. supervised the project. J.L. built initial constructs and validated them in vitro and in vivo. T.A.W. performed all cerebellar axonal tracing and colour profile analysis with programs developed with J. Lu. H.K. performed all live imaging experiments. R.W.D. generated Brainbow-1.0 lines expressing cytoplasmic XFPs, and R.A.B. generated Brainbow-1.1 constructs and lines. J.L., T.A.W. and R.W.D. screened mouse lines.

S.H.C. designed and performed experiments, analysed data and wrote the paper; N.C., M.T. and J.M.G. designed and performed experiments; D.R. and M.B.G. developed analytical tools; and C.I.B. designed experiments, analysed data and wrote the paper.
(more on the post continuation page)

Continue reading "Author contributions audit" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 05, 2007
Categories: Authors, Authorship, Categories, Policies | Permalink | Comments (3)

This week's Nature addresses how the responsibilities of co-authors for a scientific paper’s integrity could be made more explicit (Nature 450, 1; 2007). The text of the (free access) editorial:

The two most notorious frauds of modern science, by the stem-cell biologist Woo Suk Hwang and the physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, both brought into question the responsibilities of co-authors in the oversight of their colleagues’ work. But despite the concerns raised after these episodes, there remains a need for a clearer understanding, both within a collaboration and by readers of the eventual papers, of the various contributions made by the authors not only to the research but also to safeguarding its integrity.
One welcome development in transparency was pioneered by the medical journals. Authorship of a paper is justified when a researcher has contributed significantly to the work being described and to the writing or approval of the manuscript. But the traditional publication style is entirely opaque as to which co-author contributed what. Concern about ‘honorary authorship’ — in which an author is unacceptably included for reasons other than any scientific contribution — and about this lack of transparency has led to the increasing use of statements in papers that specify authors’ contributions. Some medical journals require them, and others, including the Nature family, strongly encourage their use and may yet make them compulsory.
Such statements delineate contributions to the work but do not underwrite its integrity. Something more is needed.
It is too glib to state that every co-author of a paper shares full responsibility for its content. A researcher who specializes in the radio-active dating of rock strata cannot necessarily be expected to vouch for a palaeontologist’s analysis of fossils within them — especially if the work has been carried out in labs on different continents.
The fact that simple trust may no longer suffice is a sad reflection on recent scientific history, but anything that supports public confidence in research has to be welcomed, provided that its burden is not too great. What follows is a proposal in that direction, on which we invite readers’ comments.
We suggest that journals should require that every manuscript has at least one author per collaborating research group who will go on record in a way that collectively vouches for the paper’s standards. Each would sign a statement with reference to Nature’s publication policies as follows:
“I have ensured that every author in my research group has seen and approved this manuscript. The data that are presented in the figures and tables were reviewed in raw form, the analysis and statistics applied are appropriate and the figures are accurate representations of the data. Any manipulations of images conform to Nature’s guidelines. All journal policies on materials and data sharing, ethical treatment of research subjects, conflicts of interest, biosecurity etc. have been adhered to. I have confidence that all of the conclusions presented are based on accurate extrapolations from the data collected for this study and that my colleagues listed as co-authors have contributed and deserve the designation ‘author’.”
Principal investigators traditionally bask in the glory of a well-received paper. We are proposing now that they willingly open themselves to sanctions that could be brought to bear should the paper turn out to have major problems.
Misconduct investigators go out of their way to spare anyone apart from the direct perpetrators, but they have indicated concerns over the degree of oversight within collaborations. If the damage to reputations were more widespread in the event of fraud, researchers would be even more fastidious about the data emanating from their labs and the due diligence they would impose. The chances of major frauds, with their disproportionate impact on the reputation of science as a whole, would be diminished.
We invite comments from readers on this editorial.
(The Nature journals' current policies can be seen at Nature's Guide to Authors and at the Author and Reviewers' website.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 31, 2007
Categories: Authorship, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (23)

Dr Robin Rose writes: Recently, the scientific community was presented with a paper containing the names of no fewer than 21 authors in Nature. The race for recognition in certain areas of study appears to have many scientists battling for authorships on as many papers as will accept them. Any number of journals seem to find this acceptable. Thinking back through my long career in science I cannot recall ever seeing an article or "letter," in this case, with so many authors: 1/21 would suggest an average 4.76% contribution, with some contributing more and some less (!). While collaboration is often praiseworthy, I found myself asking more than a few questions:

(1) How does a paper with so many authors actually get written, accepted for review, and then revised? What does author mean in such a case?
(2) How does such a paper 'count' in terms of value in academic promotion and tenure? Did 20+ people have the same idea at the same time?
(3) What level of credit does each author take when such a paper is part of a resumé or when citation statistics are considered?
(4) After the first three to five authors, how is the contribution of the rest gauged?
(5) Does the author order have some significance when there are 20+?
(6) Is research more credible with 20+ authors? Should journals allow for 30+ authors?
(7) Are 20+ authors meant as some sort of statement, whether scientific, political or scientifically political?
(8) Were authors added as a way to strengthen the conclusions, but also implying that a few did most of the work, more did a bit of the work, and the rest did very little?
(9) Are the authors part of a collective group? Why not use the group name as the author?
(10) Are we witnessing "author inflation?"

Such questions are important for scientists, journal editors, and their supervisors to sort out. Maybe papers with high author counts are intended to display some harmony that exists in the international academic and research community. Maybe we need to stop using the vague "et al" and go to "first author name plus 20" (the specific number of co-authors) so as to better clarify multiple contributions. There may be more issues, questions, and possibilities but I'll leave those to countless other authors.

Dr Robin Rose, Research Cooperative College of Forestry, Oregon State University.

Maxine Clarke, on behalf of the Nature journals, adds: we welcome responses (in the comments section below) to Dr Rose's points. Our authorship policies do not specify a particular order or maximum number of authors, but we do strongly encourage authors to include a statement in the end notes to specify the actual contribution of each coauthor to the completed work.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 21, 2007
Categories: Authors, Authorship, Policies | Permalink | Comments (8)