This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. Topics include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, peer review, grant writing, ethical issues in scientific publication, and writing for general audiences.
6.2: Authorship
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Writing in the Sciences
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從本節課中
6
Unit 6 discusses the peer review process, as well as ethical issues in scientific publishing. You will learn how to avoid plagiarism, determine authorship, submit a paper, write a peer review, and avoid predatory journals.
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Dr. Kristin SainaniAssociate Professor
Health Research and Policy
In this next module, we're going to discuss authorship.
My main advice on authorship is to think about the authorship
before you write the paper.
Especially, if you're the person drafting the paper.
Think about who is going to get authorship.
Think about what the order will be.
Run that by people and establish that early on in the process so
that everybody's on the same page.
So that nobody feels slighted later on.
There are two questions that you have to answer with authorship.
First of all, who gets authorship?
Who are you going to include as an author on your paper?
The main criterion here is that if you are an author listed on the paper,
then you are taking public responsiblity for its content.
That's a high bar.
It means that if later, the paper is found to have a problem.
If it’s found to have fraud, if it’s retracted.
You are responsible.
You are liable for those transgressions.
And that is going to reflect badly on you.
So if you are not the primary author of the paper,
before you except co-authorship ask yourself
the question as to whether you want to take that level of responsibility.
Do you really understand the ins and outs of the paper well enough?
And if you're the one writing the paper and
trying to decide on authors, keep in mind that most people
don't want to be included on your paper unless they have been fully involved.
For example, sometimes I give students, or colleagues, a little help on statistics,
or editing, or something.
And then they might come back to me and say,
do you want to be an author on the paper?
And I don't want to be an author on that paper, because I haven't been sufficiently
involved with its content to feel that I can take public responsibility.
I think junior people feel this obligation
to include every senior person that they've ever talked to about the article.
But keep in mind that most people don't want to be on your paper unless they can
take public responsibility for its content.
So they're not going to be offended if you don't offer them authorship.
You can always put them in the acknowledgment section as I'll talk about
it a minute.
And then of course there's the issue of order,
what order with the authors appear in?
In general, of course, order implies the authors' relative contributions.
The first author is usually the person who wrote up the draft of the paper,
might have been the person who collected all the data, often a graduate student, or
a junior person.
And the last position is usually the senior author, the head of the lab or
research team, or the senior person who oversaw the research.
That's a position of stature as well.
Sometimes you'll have dual first authors,
if maybe two graduate students worked on it together equally.
In between the first and last positions,
you should put everyone else in their order of their contributions.
If it's not clear if the rest of the authors contributed equally without much
differentiation, you could consider putting them in alphabetical order or
even reverse alphabetical order.
And sometimes you get these large working groups now with lots and
lots of people, international collaborations.
Those large working groups can be cited as a group
because they often comprise hundreds of authors.
As I mentioned, papers have an acknowledgements section.
That's where you are going to cite any funding sources.
So if you're a graduate student who is on a certain fellowship,
make sure you cite your funding source there.
If it was a grant funded study, you're going to mention the grant there.
This is also a good place to acknowledge people who you don't feel
merit authorship, and who probably don't want to be authors on the paper, but
maybe they gave you some materials, or
they offered some statistical consulting or some other advice.
It's a way to acknowledge those people without making them take on the role
of author.
I also want to mention the ethical issues of ghost authorship and guest authorship.
This is a hot button particularly in the medical literature.
It's been written about in the New York Times and
its had some pretty profound influence on the medical literature.
It's important that you are aware of these practices.
Obviously they are to be avoided when it comes to authorship.
A ghost author is a professional writer
who usually a company hires to draft a manuscript.
At the end of the day the writer is not listed as an author on the manuscript
though they may have written the whole paper.
Hence the term, ghost authorship.
Now, there's nothing wrong with professional writers being
involved in the writing process.
Scientists can certainly use the help of writers, but
it's the lack of transparency that's suspect here.
The ghost writer is likely a paid gun for the drug company, but
this is completely hidden.
The related type of authorship is guest authorship, or
sometimes called honorary authorship.
This is when a company does a study, analyzes the data,
draws their conclusions, drafts the paper, then they call or
email an academic researcher at a prestigious university and
invite them to be an author, often the first author on the paper.
That academic researcher certainly can't take public responsibility for the study.
But they're often willing to lend their name because drug company studies
are often large high quality clinical trials that get published in
great journals, and this goes on the academics resume.
The drug company meanwhile gets to bolster their papers credibility by
leading researchers to believe that an outside independent unbiased
expert was a driving force in the study.
Obviously, this is misleading if in fact the academic was only minimally involved
and is simply lending their name, and their institution's name to the paper.
It's unclear how common these types of unethical authorship
practices are in the literature.
And journals have now cracked down on this so hopefully the prevalence is decreasing.
But a study in the British Medical Journal in 2011 that
surveyed top medical journals found evidence of honorary or
guest authorship in 17.6% of papers.
And evidence of ghost authorship in 7.6% of papers.
So at least in 2011, this practice was fairly pervasive.
If you're interested in learning more about this, the medical community learned
a lot about this practice because of litigation surrounding the drug Vioxx.
Merck was being sued over the drug Vioxx,
which was to found to increase the risk of heart attacks.
Because of the court trials,
internal company documents entered the public domain.
And there's a fascinating article in JAMA from 2008,
where some researchers systematically reviewed 250 court documents
related to published clinical trial and published review papers.
What they found was pretty shocking.
The researchers reviewed emails and
other documents related to 24 clinical trial papers that Merck was involved with.
Here's what they dug up, straight from the results section.
Documents were found describing Merck employees working either independently or
in collaboration with medical publishing companies to prepare manuscripts and
subsequently recruiting external
academically affiliated investigators to be authors.
Recruited authors were frequently placed in the first and
second positions of the authorship list.
The use of guest or
honorary authorship was an accepted practice at Merck apparently.
They also looked at 72 review papers that the company was involved in publishing.
They found, documents were found describing Merck marketing employees
developing plans for manuscripts,
contracting with medical publishing companies to ghostwrite manuscripts, and
recruiting external, academically affiliated investigators to be authors.
Recruited authors were commonly the sole author on the manuscript and
offered honoraria for their participation.
Only half of the review articles even disclosed that Merck
had sponsored those papers.
That's quite insidious and
you can see that this could have profound impact on the medical literature.
Merck could actually put this whole set of opinions and perspectives out in
the medical literature with it having the stamp of coming from an academic
institution, when it really came from the drug company marketing people.
You can see why this has been such a hot issue.
And just to give you an idea, this is an actual internal company email
that was made public during the court trial.
It shows you how blatant this practice is.
The company writes to the potential guest author, I would like to invite you to be
an author on the abstract and manuscript for this study.
We are currently preparing both for submission before the end of this year.
Could you please let me know if you would be interested in authorship
on both the abstract and manuscript, one of the two planned publications, or none?
In making your decision, you may want to take into consideration that the results
of this study were negative at first glance.
Basically, the company is giving out authorship like a gift.
And they're allowing the researcher to choose whether or not they want to accept
this gift based on how the study results happened to come out.
Clearly the author being invited here has no basis for
taking public responsibility for the content of these articles.
Obviously this researcher was not heavily involved in the analysis,
because the analysis is already done, or
the writing of the paper, it's already being drafted.
This is a clear case of guest authorship.
And the trial turned up many emails like this that made it
obvious as to what was going on.
Again, it's a fascinating topic, it's been widely written about.
I'm giving you some references here, if you'd like to read more,
about these unethical authorship practices.
There's some interesting articles in the New York Times that
are worth your time to read.
