Abstract
A simple tool is provided to assist researchers in assessing contributions to a scientific publication, for ease in evaluating which contributors qualify for authorship, and in what order the authors should be listed. The tool identifies four phases of activity leading to a publication—Conception and Design, Data Acquisition, Analysis and Interpretation, and Manuscript Preparation. By comparing a project participant’s contribution in a given phase to several specified thresholds, a score of up to five points can be assigned; the contributor’s scores in all four phases are summed to yield a total “contribution score”, which is compared to a threshold to determine which contributors merit authorship. This tool may be useful in a variety of contexts in which a systematic approach to authorial credit is desired.
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Notes
Of course, the number of citations the individual’s papers have accumulated serves as a useful metric for evaluating the importance of the individual’s work, but we set that aside as a secondary consideration for this paper.
This presumes the convention in which the first author is the one who played the most substantial role in performing the research, and the last author is the principal investigator, the author who played the most substantial role in supervising the research, see, e.g., (Strange 2008) and (Bennett and Taylor 2003).
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Warrender, J.M. A Simple Framework for Evaluating Authorial Contributions for Scientific Publications. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 1419–1430 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9719-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9719-0