The authorship dilemma: who gets credit for what?

Psychologists explore better ways to define research authorship.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

Researchers in Matthew McGue?s lab often wrestle with tricky questions of where their names belong on the author line, or if they belong there at all.

This deliberation is typical in large projects like McGue?s?a multigrant study on adult psychopathology at the University of Minnesota. What if, for example, a graduate student on the project develops a new psychopathology measure: Should she be first author on a related article, or should McGue?

According to McGue, whose lab has drawn up an authorship guide to resolve such questions fairly, the student would likely be first author, just as McGue would be first author on aspects of the research he?d conceptualized.

But across research fields and universities, the rules of determining research authorship are often unclear. Disputes quickly become personal.

And the stakes are high, because this is a system that makes or breaks careers.

Authoring papers?particularly attaining the trophy of first author?leads to faculty positions for graduate students, tenure for junior faculty and big research grants for senior faculty.

Problems emerge, though, because senior researchers are ultimately the ones who control grants, projects and authorship. The result is a power imbalance that can trigger abuses by senior researchers and misunderstandings and paranoia among junior researchers, says psychologist Margot Holaday, PhD, a University of Southern Mississippi psychologist who researches the ethics of authorship.

"On the one hand you have the underdog researcher who?s wrongfully ousted from the author line or relegated to second author and doesn?t say anything for fear of the career fallout," says Holaday.

"On the other hand you have the young researcher who doesn?t understand the process, didn?t come up with the research idea, but expects an author credit because she did the grunt work."

To help prevent such problems?and the hard feelings and bitter lawsuits that can result?most fields, including psychology, have set ethical guidelines for authorship. But the guidelines on?t provide rules for many authorship situations. And to complicate matters further, researchers increasingly work across disciplines and must reconcile different authorship practices.

Responding to the growing complexity, many in the research community are seeking better solutions. Some charging that it?s too easy for senior researchers to take credit for their subordinates? work, have set in motion a government effort to clarify areas of misconduct. (The National Science and Technology Council has drafted misconduct policies and procedures, due for release this month.)

Others have moved to reject authorship altogether and publish as a group. And a rising number of labs and departments are, like McGue?s, setting hard-and-fast rules. One rule they all agree on is to decide the authors and their order before the research begins, then renegotiate as necessary.

High stakes

Fueling the discord over authorship is the "extraordinary" pressure on junior researchers to author more research papers sooner than they had to in years past, says McGue. He has written a guidance section on authorship for a draft of APA?s tentatively titled document, "The Ethics of Research with Human Participants," which has been released for public comment by APA?s Board of Scientific Affairs.

A number of forces explain the increased pressure. One is tighter competition for faculty positions; another is the growing difficulty of attaining tenure, says psychologist James Neely, PhD, a professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), and editor of APA?s Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. "Quantitative output is everything in this country," says Neely. "People count publications for merit raises and hiring because it?s easier than gauging research quality."

Another reason for the increased pressure is the trend toward collaborative teams and big grants in research, says Sangeeta Panicker, PhD, APA?s research ethics officer. At the turn of the century, one researcher would head a small project and automatically author all related publications. Now a large crew of researchers often works on different aspects and phases of one giant project. Thus, they must jostle and compete for coveted authorship credit, says Panicker.

What constitutes authorship?

Providing some direction to psychologists are authorship guidelines described in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fourth Edition (1994), and APA?s "Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct" (1992). Both stipulate that anyone named as author must contribute substantially to a project, that senior or managerial status alone does not justify author credit (naming such a noncontributing person is called "gift authorship"), and that students are usually first author on papers that are based on their dissertations. The Ethics Code also holds that authorship order should "accurately reflect the relative scientific or professional contribution" of the researchers.

Any rules beyond that are up to researchers. But in a 1993 article on determining authorship credit, published in APA?s American Psychologist (Vol. 48, No. 11, p. 1141?1147) and considered a benchmark article on resolving authorship questions, Mark Fine, PhD, of the University of Missouri, and Lawrence Kurdek, PhD, of Wright State University, suggest a few other guiding principles:

? Faculty qualify for second author on a student?s dissertation only if they?ve made substantial contributions to the project. Although second author doesn?t hold the same weight as first author, it does acknowledge a researcher?s hard work and counts toward that person?s publication list.

? Paying a researcher for research tasks should not substitute for authorship credit, if the researcher has earned it.

? Scholars qualify for authorship credit if they help craft the research design, write substantial portions of the manuscript or integrate research theories. Tasks such as inputting or crunching data don?t count as authorship.

The problems

The rules of authorship are similar in other social sciences, but they differ slightly in the biological sciences, in which the last author is typically the intellectual force behind the project and the first author is the one who did the empirical work, says McGue. Listing those two people first and last makes them easier to identify in a long list of authors.

Medical journals historically include longer lists of authors than do social science journals, says Academic Medicine editor Addeane Caelleigh. She notes that the practice sometimes leads to problems of gift authorship in which people who haven?t really worked on the project are named because they hold important positions, such as head of a research department or principal investigator on a grant. In fact, there?ve been so many "outrageous claims of authorship" in medicine that medical journal editors have devised more rigorous authorship definitions, says Caelleigh.

Stickier, though, and harder to regulate, are problems of ghost authors?people who contribute substantially to a project but aren?t credited, sometimes in exchange for payment?and junior researchers whose work, ideas and authorship are usurped by senior researchers. According to Holaday?s small surveys of psychologists, junior researchers are often too fearful to blow the whistle when they feel exploited by seniors.

In recent years, though, two such claims have captured national attention. In one case, Cornell University graduate student Antonia Demas claimed that David Levitsky, PhD, a professor of psychology and nutrition, took credit for her idea about nutrition and cooking in schools. (Cornell backs Levitsky.)

In another case, University of Michigan psychologist Carolyn Phinney, PhD, claimed that psychologist Marion Perlmutter, PhD, director of a lab at the university?s Institute of Gerontology, appropriated her research on wisdom. (The university backs Perlmutter, but a jury awarded Phinney damages in a lawsuit filed over the dispute. )

It?s easy for misunderstandings to arise between students and faculty, says SUNY?s Neely. "Sometimes senior researchers abuse their power, but sometimes students expect too much or misunderstand the premise of authorship," he says. "Students sometimes think a professor just looks up at the ceiling and divines an experimental design, without realizing the background knowledge and intellectual work behind it," he says.

Poor communication over the duration of the research project is another source of strife, says Susan Knapp, APA?s senior director for publications. "A research project is dynamic," she says. "Things change in the project and in people?s lives. You have births, deaths, divorces. So you need to talk about how to handle that."

The solutions

In an effort to improve authorship practices, some researchers have petitioned the federal government and Congress to better define research authorship and misconduct. Responding to the Phinney and Demas cases, Dan Pearson, an aide to Rep. George Brown (D?Calif.), is drafting proposed legislation to protect junior researchers? legal rights. He plans a Congressional Science Committee hearing on scientific misconduct for the next session of Congress.

Other researchers seek to dislodge the practice of selecting authors and listing them in order of their contributions. One of them is psychologist Michael Cole, PhD, who, tired of "haggling over authorship," decided that his research laboratory would publish under its title, the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition. Some researchers even toss a coin to determine author order or list themselves alphabetically.

But as long as career advancement rides on authorship credit?and indexing and citations rely on listing a first author?the traditional system of determining authorship will prevail, say Fine and Kurdek. To avoid the misunderstandings that can arise from the system, they suggest some possible steps that researchers can follow:

? Spell out the rules for young researchers?Inform newcomers about how authorship decisions are made and authorship order is determined.

? Assess the skills of the research collaborators?Take inventory of everyone?s experiences and abilities.

? Decide who will do what?Divide tasks and determine which ones constitute authorship. Everyone can sign written agreements, says Kurdek.

? Renegotiate agreements about credit and order as needed?Forge new agreements when project dynamics change or when substantial manuscript rewriting is needed.

? If reaching an agreement proves difficult, consult colleagues or establish third-party arbitration?Talk to colleagues about solutions to a problem. Arbitration can also help resolve disputes and deflect litigation.

Other options include devising a points system of weighing researchers? relative contributions, running workshops on authorship and writing manuals to guide authorship decisions. Ultimately, successful authorship agreements require the same ingredients as successful human relationships, says Kurdek.

"Just like in any good relationship, role clarity is important," he says. "People will be happy with the agreement if they trust one another, know their responsibilities, and set and meet the same set of expectations."Y

For Further Reference:

APA?s "Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct" (1992).

Flanagin A. et al. "Prevalence of articles with honorary authors and ghost authors in peer-reviewed medical journals." Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 280, No. 3, p. 222?224, 1998.

Holaday, M. & Yost, T.E. "A preliminary investigation of ethical problems in publication and research." Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 281?291, 1995.

Holaday, M. & Yost, T.E. "Publication ethics." Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, Vol. 8, No. 4, p. 557?566, 1993.