How can Academic search engine provide information about contribution of authors?
about authorship, statement of contribution, and Scinapse’s idea
In the history of science, scientists had usually published their research results alone. However, because of the development of technology and the expansion of the range of knowledge, the number of manpower required for research has increased, and the collaboration of various fields have become necessary. As a result, many researchers collaborate and publish results jointly. This leads to an increase in the number of authors per publication. For example, the physics paper with 5,154 authors(Related article) is a dramatic case.
If so, here we can ask the following questions.
- Who will be the authors?
- Is the first author the best contributor?
Q. Who will be the authors?
There is no universal definition and guideline for authorship. This is largely dependent on the field of study, or on the policy of specific journals and their publishers.
The representative guideline is the Recommendations(Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, or ICMJE Recommendations) published by the ICMJE(International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) first in 1978 (as URMs and renamed in 2013 revision). It recommends that authorship should be based on the following 4 criteria:
1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content
3. Final approval of the version to be published
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
In conclusion, the authors should have sufficient participation in the research activities and have formal responsibility. Therefore, they recommend that researchers who have participated in the acquisition of a research fund or in simple data collection are not eligible for authorship so that they should be referred to as a “Non-Author Contributors”, not an author.
So, do these guidelines work well?
Likewise, the guidelines for qualification of authorship has been strict in recent years but it does NOT work well. That’s probably because authorship is like an academic currency, as it is very closely linked to researchers’ job promotions, project funding, and essentially their academic reputation. The phrase “Publish or Perish”, which is widely referred to in the research community, shows the problem of evaluating academic productivity based on “how many publications they have authored”. In other words, authorship has a direct impact on researchers career. Therefore, although the requirements for authorship became more complicated, researchers may try to have simply more authorship, as much as possible.
This leads to inadequate practices for obtaining authorship. Examples include gift authors(included without contributing to the research) and honorary authors(included as a boss of the organization). Especially in the medical field where the apprenticeship system is specialized, it is very common to include gift and honorary authors. In fact, A 2002 survey of a large sample of researchers who had received funding from the U.S. NIH(National Institutes of Health) revealed that 10% of respondents claimed to have inappropriately assigned authorship credit within the last three years. There are other cases, such as ghost authors(excluded for various reasons).
These inadequate practices may distort the reputation of academics or exaggerate capability of unqualified ones, but most importantly they spoil the trust in academia. It has thus long been criticized, and resolution is still required.
Q. Is the “first author” the best contributor?
It is difficult to be sure of this because there is no guideline about representing contribution between authors like authorship. For example, in the field of mathematics and economics, the authors are published in alphabetical order. The same is true for the field of study, where large-scale group projects take place such as particle physics.
However, in general, yes, the first author is the best contributor. The general method is that the first author becomes a practitioner in charge of the research, and the last author becomes the research director as the corresponding author. It is used in social science, medicine, biology and engineering. This is increasingly used as a standard in most fields of study, but as mentioned earlier, it does not apply to all field.
The point here is that we do not know what an author did when we read the papers. We guess through the author’s order in a general way, but this is very poor information. Some journals have compulsory submission of the statement which is about the contribution of each author when publishing a paper. However, this also doesn’t hold for all the journals, and sometimes readers may not get such information if it is only shared between authors and editors.
What do we need?
The answer can be inferred naturally from the previous contents.
1. Evaluating simply as an ‘author’ produces inadequate practices.
2. There is a lack of information about what authors have contributed.
3. That is, we need transparency for authorship, or rather, “contributorship”. We know who were the authors, but we do not know the background at all.
In the research community, the academic currency should be actual work, not just the “authorship” but “what contribution” is made by the authors. This can be a key to breaking inadequate practices in the fields of study.
There is a CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) as an example for enhancing transparency of author contribution. CRediT is a classification system used to identify specific contributions to published research works. The CRediT which defined 14 categories of contributions lead researchers to assign contributor roles relatively easily in a structured format in the process of developing and publishing a paper.
CRediT is currently used for authors and publishers (editors), but in the future, it will be possible to benefit readers by publishing author contribution statements with the papers. This is similar to the authorship statements already in use by some journals, but it will be a big difference in that it is classified and published publicly. For example, there is The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery that introduced CRediT.
What if the information about authorship has transparency?
If the contribution of authors is transparent and standardized, it can be a more useful currency than simply saying ‘listed third out of six authors’. In terms of funding agencies or research institutions, detailed information on the researcher’s contribution will help the decision-making process. In other words, a better evaluation of the researcher can be made. In such settings, researchers could be credited exactly as they contributed And it also reduces inadequate practices by giving proper credit to researchers.
Above all, this can be of great help to the readers, other researchers.
Research is challenging and testing the robustness of current knowledge. Therefore, readers often need to approach the authors of the paper for their research, but they often encounter problems in communicating with appropriate individuals. Researchers mainly communicate with the last author(corresponding author), but this is slow and insufficient. As a result, being open to the reader about the contribution of the author is important in achieving the academic goals of promoting scientific collaboration and developing knowledge.
How could Scinapse complement to this?
Scinapse, our academic search engine, is aimed to provide researchers with academic information for valuable discovery. And based on the previous reasons, the information about the contribution of authors could be a good source for discovery.
Information about authors’ contributions may help readers choose better papers, or may help in filtering the authors. For example, users may want to look for a paper with a high contribution from a distinguished researcher. Users can as well avoid author who has abnormally high h-index, but actually didn’t contribute much in a certain role.
In order for the academic search engine to provide information about authors and their contributions to users, the clear standard method should be used in all of the fields of study. Of course, author name disambiguation project in progress at Scinapse will be the basis for everything.
But in the current situation without standards, we have the following ideas for providing such information.
- Denoting the first and last authors
Of course, as mentioned earlier, this method is not used in all fields of study. However, it can be used because it is ‘general’. (This may not be very helpful to researchers in fields such as mathematics or economics, so they need other methods)
Users may notice at a glance necessary information about the authors who can represent the papers and the authors who can be contacted for inquiries about the paper. And this can also be useful in the author page to provide users with insights about the author. This idea updated on February in Scinapse.
- Provides supplementary metric
We can suggest the supplementary metric such as the ratio of the publication registered as the first or last author to the total publication. This could well work in the medical/biology field that the most contributing researcher becomes the first author, and having a lot of case of the honorary author. But, again, it will fail completely in the mathematics field. So this idea could be applied to a specific field of study. - Provides author classification system information.
we can collaborate with a journal like JBJS journal in which the contribution of the author is described in the paper. Through collaborate, we can show the parts of each author’s contribution to the author page. This will be very good information although it might cover just little portion of whole literature.
In this post, I have summarized current authorship problems and one example of a solution, CRediT, and ideas for providing information about authors’ contributions to users in Scinapse the academic search engine.
Many of the problems in Academia have started with lack of standardization and transparency. We will continue to seek ways to solve these problems.
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Scinapse: Academic search engine
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