One of my distinct memories from elementary school is going to “library class” to learn about the Dewey decimal classification and how to use a card catalog to find books. Searching for books efficiently was possible because cards in the catalog were sorted lexicographically.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the system required authors of books to be totally ordered. Without an ordering of authors in a book with multiple authors, there would be no way to decide where to place the card for the book in a catalog searchable by author. The practice of ordering authors on publications is evident in the oldest printed texts and has persisted to this day. I have never thought that it could be any other way.
However this past Wednesday I was visiting the University of Washington to deliver a seminar, and among the highlights of the visit was my meeting with the graduate students. I met 12 for lunch and two more came for dinner. Meeting with students is always my favorite part of a visit to a university. They have original and creative ideas, and most importantly, are not bound in their thought by archaic tradition. They frequently don’t know what one is supposed to think and how one is supposed to say it. They just think and speak!
One of the students I met on Wednesday was Vanessa Gray, a student of Doug Fowler, who in a conversation on authorship practices suggested to me the radical and brilliant idea that papers should be published without an ordering of authors.
Many journals now have a section called “Author contributions” where roles of individuals in collaborative projects can be described (many journals now require such descriptions). So why bother ordering the authors for a list underneath the title? As far as indexing and searching goes, Google and other search engines require only a set of authors, and not a specific ordering.
I agree with Vanessa that ending author ordering on publications would greatly improve fairness in the biological sciences, where many current projects involve complex assemblies of teams with complementary skills. “First authorship” is not well-defined when one author performed a large number of difficult experiments, and another developed novel algorithms and wrote complex software for analyzing the experiments. Similarly, “last authorship” fails as a concept when students are co-advised, or one principal investigator provides substantial funding on a project, while another is participating in doing the work. And recently, large consortium projects have completely destroyed any meaning of “author” by having hundreds, or even thousands of authors on projects. Even when there are relatively few authors people rarely credit anyone except the first and last authors, even if others did substantial work. In the recent ENCODE paper published in PNAS with 30 authors, it appears to me from the responses to my previous blog post about the paper that the 5th and 6th authors did a lot (majority?) of the work in putting together figures and results, yet I suspect the “credit” for the paper will go to the first author (the flip side in that case is that the first author is where blame is assigned as well).
There is also a theoretical justification for not ordering authors. Ordering of authors on a publication can be thought of as a ranking produced by “votes” of the participants in the project. Of course in practice not all votes are equal. In what is called dictatorship in social choice theory, PIs frequently make the decisions independently of how specific authors feel they may have contributed. This may work on a paper where there is a single PI (although it may be considered unfair by the graduate students and postdocs), however dictatorship as a system for determining authorship certainly breaks down when multiple PIs collaborate on a project. Arrow’s impossibility theorem explains that in the absence of dictatorship, there is a problem in producing a single ordering satisfying two other seemingly basic and essential fairness criteria. Informally, the theorem states that there is no authorship ordering system based on voting of contributing authors that can satisfy the following three criteria:
- If every author thinks that X should be ordered before Y, then the author list should have X placed before Y.
- For a fixed list of voting preferences regarding the ordering of X vs. Y, the ordering between X and Y in the author list will not depend on the ordering of other pairs such as X and Z, Y and Z, or Z and W.
- There is no “dictator”, i.e. no single author possesses the power to determine the author ordering.
Authors frequently have differing opinions about the impact of their own contribution to a publication, and therefore their preferences (votes) for author ordering are discordant. This means that any system for ordering authors will not satisfy everyone’s preferences, and in the sense of Arrow’s impossibility theorem will be unfair. One way around Arrow’s impossibility theorem is to specify authorship order without regard to authors’ preferences, for example by always ordering authors alphabetically (the Hardy-Littlewood rule). This method, usually the one used in the mathematical sciences, is also fraught with problems. Of course, listing author contributions for what they are is not entirely trivial. For example, different authors may have conflicting views about what it means to have “written the text of the paper”. But using words to describe contributions allow for much more detail about what each author did, and allows for nuanced contributions to be described (e.g., John and Jane were in the room when the initial idea for the project was discussed, but did not contribute anything afterwards).
To summarize, in the modern era of electronic publishing ordering of authors is unnecessary, and if it is unnecessary, then why confront Arrow’s theorem and inevitably produce orderings unfairly? Publications should just explain the author contributions. Time to end ordered authorship.
The card catalog at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library (from Wikipedia).
13 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 16, 2014 at 8:29 pm
julian
I do like the econ (and math) approach of alphabetizing, partly for exactly this reason. Had never considered unordered, but that sounds at least as good.
May 16, 2014 at 8:40 pm
Lior Pachter
I don’t think that alphabetical order is necessarily a good system. I haven’t read this paper carefully, so I’m not sure the results hold up to scrutiny, but I’ve seen some of the arguments put forth elsewhere as well:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535707002272
The conclude that “the reputational advantage of first-authorship motivates people to manipulate their names so as to obtain a more beneficial alphabetical position within the majority of articles.”
Unordered authorship eliminates the possibility for any such effect or manipulation thereof.
May 17, 2014 at 7:13 am
aramharrow
It is true that people refer to many-author alphabetical papers as something like “Aaronson et al.” But what exactly do you propose instead? If our papers with in postscript, then they could dynamically randomized the author ordering each time we printed them, but I’m not sure this is possible in pdf.
June 18, 2014 at 1:46 pm
Steve Harvey
Like you, I already have tenure. For those who don’t, author order is, unfortunately, critical, at least until Promotion and Tenure committees stop evaluating CVs with simple metrics.
This is only part of a much larger issue: what qualities SHOULD universities value in their faculty? The current culture favors big numbers — large research groups, multiple grants, lots of publications — all of which require long, long hours. Woe to the young faculty member who believes that coaching his daughter’s soccer team or taking a leadership role in her church/synagogue/mosque is an important contribution.
May 17, 2014 at 1:24 am
homolog.us
When you talk about getting rid of ‘corresponding author’ culture as well, I will listen to you.
May 17, 2014 at 2:38 am
Rob
You make some good points but I don’t think I would support a change like this, for a few reasons.
(1) Unless the system is enforced and begins on a set date, I suspect that PIs will resist adopting it for as long as possible. This is because, while there exist both ordered and non-ordered author lists, the first (and last) author positions will be coveted. That is, say I am PI and can choose to go first/last author or to tell my team we are going alphabetical (realistically, PIs are going to make this decision on their own, not put it to a vote: nobody gives up power voluntarily): unless my name is Aaron A. Aaronson, I have a vested interest in using the ordered system. I lose if I get an alphabetical middle position and readers assume I contributed less than I really did.
(2) Nobody really reads those author contribution footnotes. Besides, I suspect that they are often inaccurate (I have had discussions with PIs about author ordering, but they have often written contribution footnotes on their own, which means they often exaggerate their own contributions and downplay those of students and other co-authors).
(3) Most papers I ‘read’, I only read the abstract and check out the author list. The ordering of authors does mean something. It might not be 100% accurate, but you can make a solid assumption that the first author contributed most, the last author oversaw the project (especially if they are corresponding author), and the remaining authors contributed less the further down the list they are. Sure, there might be extra nuance in an author contribution footnote, but there is nothing wrong with using the ordering of author names as a rule of thumb.
(4) I don’t think it matters whether digital indexing requires an ordered list. We can’t write names in a word cloud. We have to write names in a list. And that list might as well have more meaning than less.
May 17, 2014 at 4:26 am
dsalo
Librarian pedant here: Actually it was more complicated than that, and is about to become less so. In the card-catalog era, librarians made cards for the first THREE authors listed on a book. The goal was to help people searching for books by author, as many people in fact do; it meant a more nearly complete list.
This persisted into the computerized-catalog era as the “Rule of Three,” but the newest US cataloging standard (Resource Description and Access) does away with the Rule of Three, such that all authors on a book will be listed in that book’s record. (It’s a little more complicated with bazillion-contributor efforts like movies, of course…)
May 17, 2014 at 7:12 am
aramharrow
I agree that author ordering is annoying and has many negatives. But it does have some not-easily-replaced positives. It’s nice to have a way to contribute to a paper that warrants more than an acknowledgment, but far less than what the main authors do. Without this, some teams will be reluctant to add authors who have only contributed a little. So there are tradeoffs. The deeper problem of course is that scientists are motivated partly by a desire to improve knowledge and partly by a desire to take credit for doing so.
May 17, 2014 at 6:08 pm
nanonymous
I’ve always thought that the english language should have a comma-like delimiter for an explicitly unordered set of things. Perhaps using curly braces in prose would be best.
The solution would be for alphabetically listing names and then use a deterministic human readable hash/portmanteau (hashmonteau?) of the author names, title and year in citations in a way that wasn’t gameable.
May 29, 2014 at 8:58 pm
John Cowan
Don’t forget about the famous paper by Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow, on which Bethe did no work (but was inserted by Gamow humoris causa, to the lifelong resentment of Alpher).
June 18, 2014 at 1:34 pm
Steve Harvey
After Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, my favorite is the paper by M Vorlickova, J Kypr, TM Jovin and Max Planck (Biopolymers (1990) 29:385). Planck had been dead for over 40 years. The editor/proofreader at Biopolymers failed to realize that Tom Jovin was at the Max Planck Institute; “Max Planck” got moved from the affiliations line to the end of the authors list.
December 7, 2014 at 5:33 pm
Joe Corbo
Perhaps listing the authors names in a circle will solve the problem.
March 30, 2015 at 9:42 am
Lior Pachter
Indeed! That is what we did with the SLAM gene finding software manual back in 2004.