No one wants to talk about authorship
Authorship can be a difficult topic for many researchers, especially when it is their first publication in a lab. Fortunately for you, dear friend*, I’ve devised four useful rules when it comes to deciding authorship on a paper:
- You should talk about authorship before you think you need to talk about authorship.
- You should talk about authorship even though it can be awkward.
- You should talk about authorship even if you’re not sure exactly where the project is headed.
- Oh, and you should talk about authorship before you think you need to.
* “Friend” does not constitute reason for authorship, I am sorry to report.
Authorship in neuroscience and biology journals
Conventions about author order vary from field to field. In most journals related to neuroscience, the author order goes something like this:
This breakdown depends on people’s feelings about authorship (see below), and conventions within each lab or subfield.
There’s typically 3–6 authors on a neuroscience paper. But as research gets more and more collaborative, we might start seeing more papers like this:
The field is still adapting to this new idea of authorship shared with hundreds of other people — it’s unclear how this will play out for job credentials.
Starting the conversation
These aren’t the easiest conversations to start, but you can do it. I recommend bringing this topic up as soon as a new collaborative project begins — in the initial meeting, for example. Chances are that everyone else is wondering about authorship as well. It’s the big, unauthored elephant in the room.
Before you dive in, consider where you stand.
As a PI, be clear and consistent
If you are the PI, hopefully you have already thought about this and have clear guidelines for how you’d like to grant authorship as well as order authors on a paper. Here’s a few things to consider:
- For some researchers, authorship implies that someone has contributed intellectually on the paper, but not everyone feels this way. Does manual labor on the paper constitute authorship? If so, how much (in terms of hours per week) does someone have to contribute in order to be counted?
- Often, abandoned projects are picked up by new people in the lab. Does the person who originally formulated the project get credit, even if none of their data ends up in the paper?
- If someone wrote code that was used in the paper, should they be an author? If so, how much code? And what if that code already received credit in another paper?
- If a collaborator provides a key mouse line, reagent, or other necessary ingredient, will they be included? Does it matter if they’ve already published something about it?
Don’t put the burden on your students and postdocs to initiate these conversations — as the PI, this is your job.
Your feelings about authorship are valid
If you’re not the PI, hopefully you already have some idea about how your PI decides the authors on a paper. If not, take a look at some of the papers that have already been published by the lab, and consider the questions above.
Hopefully your PI will be really forthcoming about how authorship will play out. If not, you’ll need to take initiative. If the project is almost completed and you’ve been waiting and hoping your PI will mention authorship but they haven’t, you might need to get the ball rolling.
Initiate a conversation with your PI about any questions or concerns you may have, or if you have strong feelings about how to decide on authorship. Your entryway is as simple as, “If we have results worth publishing, how will we determine the order and inclusion of authors?” Talk to an uninvolved labmate about it first, if you need some practice, or reassurance that this is a necessary conversation.
Ultimately, your PI has the final decision about authorship, but you have every right to voice your opinion and feel heard.
Like what you read here?
This article is a piece of my book, So you want to be a neuroscientist? (Columbia University Press, December 2020) which offers aspiring neuroscientists honest, informative insight about our field as well as education and careers in it. You can order the book here.
