Archive for Authorship

What should it mean to be an author of a scientific paper?

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 12, 2023 by telescoper

The implementation of artificial intelligence techniques in tools for generating text (such as ChatGPT) has caused a lot of head-scratching recently as organizations try to cope with the implications. For instance, I noticed that the arXiv recently adopted a new policy on the use of generative AI in submissions. One obvious question is whether ChatGPT can be listed as an author. This has an equally obvious answer: “no”. Authors are required to acknowledge the use of such tools when they have used them in writing a paper.

One particular piece of the new policy statement caught my eye:

…by signing their name as an author of a paper, they each individually take full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. If generative AI language tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s).

The first sentence of this quote states an obvious principle, but there are situations in which I don’t think it is applied in practice. One example relates to papers emanating from large collaborations or consortia, where the author lists are often very long indeed, sometimes numbering in the thousands. Not all the “authors” of such papers will have even read the paper, so do they “each individually take full responsibility”? I don’t think so. And how can this principle be enforced as policy?

All large consortia have methods for assigning authorship rights as a way of assigning credit for contributions made. But why does “credit” have to mean “authorship”? Papers just don’t have thousands of authors, in the meaningful sense of the term. It’s only ever a handful of people who actually do any writing. That doesn’t mean that the others didn’t do any work. The project would probably not have been possible without them. It does mean, however, that pretending that they participated in writing the article that describes the work isn’t be the right way to acknowledge their contribution. How are young scientists supposed to carve out a reputation if their name is always buried in immensely long author lists? The very system that attempts to give them credit at the same renders that credit worthless.

As science evolves it is extremely important that the methods for disseminating scientific results evolve too. The trouble is that they aren’t. We remain obsessed with archaic modes of publication, partly because of innate conservatism and partly because the lucrative publishing industry benefits from the status quo. The system is clearly broken, but the scientific community carries on regardless. When there are so many brilliant minds engaged in this sort of research, why are so few willing to challenge an orthodoxy that has long outlived its usefulness.

In my view the real problem is not so much the question of authorship but the very idea of the paper. It seems quite clear to me that the academic journal is an anachronism. Digital technology enables us to communicate ideas far more rapidly than in the past and allows much greater levels of interaction between researchers. The future for many fields will be defined not in terms of “papers” which purport to represent “final” research outcomes, but by living documents continuously updated in response to open scrutiny by the community of researchers. I’ve long argued that the modern academic publishing industry is not facilitating but hindering the communication of research. The arXiv has already made academic journals redundant in many of branches of  physics and astronomy; other disciplines will inevitably follow. The age of the academic journal is drawing to a close. Now to rethink the concept of “the paper”.

In the meantime I urge all scientists to remember that by signing their name as an author of a paper, they individually take full responsibility for all its contents. That means to me that at the very least you should have read the paper you’re claiming to have written.

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Fake Authors in Physics

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on May 30, 2017 by telescoper

Back to work – and exam business – after the Bank Holiday weekend (during most of which I was a bit under the weather), I thought I’d try to get back into the swing of blogging with a brief post about fake authorship.

What provoked me to write this was a strange news item about a Caltech professor who apparently created a fictitious female collaborator called `Ursula C. T. Gamma’ and got her name added as author on scientific papers as well as official email lists on the Caltech website; she also appears in an acknowledgement:

Finally, we thank Ursula C. T. Gamma for continued inspiration.

The professor responsible for all this was none other than Christian Ott, whom I’ve mentioned in a blog post before, because he was placed on unpaid leave by Caltech for harassing two female colleagues.

I don’t know what Ott hoped to gain by inventing a female co-worker. Was it just for a joke, or was there some ulterior motive? I’m not going to speculate here.

If you’ll excuse a bit of frivolity this episode reminded me that a few years ago I toyed with the idea of adding my cat, Columbo, under the pseudonym `Felix Columbo’, as a co-author on a paper I was writing. That would have been for my own amusement – and also because I thought Felix Columbo was a cool name for a physicist, but in the end I didn’t do it largely because I heard about F.D.C. Willard:

The American physicist and mathematician Jack H. Hetherington, Michigan State University, in 1975 wanted to publish some of his research results in the field of low–temperature physics in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. A colleague, to whom he had given his paper for review, pointed out that Hetherington had used the first person plural in his text, and that the journal would reject this form on submissions with a sole author. Rather than take the time to retype the article to use the singular tense, or to bring in a co-author, Hetherington decided to invent one.

The co-author he invented was his cat, whose name was Chester. The cat’s father was called Willard and the letters F.D.’ stand for `Felis Domesticus’ (the species name for a a house cat).

Other physicists have done similar things. For example, Nobel laureate Andre Geim has written a paper with a hamster as a co-author.

More famously, George Gamow added the name of Hans Bethe to a paper he was writing with his PhD student Ralph Alpher, simply so its authors would be Alpher, Bethe and Gamow. Bethe did subsequently work on the topic discussed in the paper – nucleosynthesis – but hadn’t significantly to the paper. It is reported that Alpher was upset by Gamow’s actions. The paper was published in the Physical Review in 1948 and is a classic in the field of physical cosmology.

As well as being an outstanding physicist, George Gamow was a very colourful and amusing fellow. I’m sure his decision to add Bethe to this paper was just meant as a bit of fun. Likewise with the cat and the hamster. These days, however, authorship of scientific papers is taken far more seriously than it was, as a means to assess research activity and distribute resources. You could argue that this emphasis on authorship is an unhealthy development, but nevertheless that’s the way things. A responsible senior scientist should know that. Adding a phoney author – even if intended as a joke – could well be construed by some institutions as a form of research misconduct.

And how are your real co-workers (especially students and postdocs) supposed to feel if you decide they haven’t contributed enough to merit authorship of a collaborative paper, when they see you adding names of people who don’t even exist?

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“Credit” needn’t mean “Authorship”

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on September 4, 2015 by telescoper

I’ve already posted about the absurdity of scientific papers with ridiculously long author lists but this issue has recently come alive again with the revelation that the compilers of the Times Higher World University Rankings decided to exclude such papers entirely from their analysis of citation statistics.

Large collaborations involving not only scientists but engineers, instrument builders, computer programmers and data analysts –  are the norm in some fields of science – especially (but not exclusively) experimental particle physics – so the arbitrary decision to omit such works from bibliometric analysis is not only idiotic but also potentially damaging to a number of disciplines. The “logic” behind this decision is that papers with “freakish” author lists might distort analyses of citation impact, even allowing – heaven forbid – small institutions with a strong involvement in world-leading studies such as those associated with the Large Hadron Collider to do well compared with larger institutions that are not involved in such collaborations.  If what you do doesn’t fit comfortably within a narrow and simplistic method of evaluating research, then it must be excluded even if it is the best in the world. A sensible person would realise that if the method doesn’t give proper credit then you need a better method, but the bean counters at the Times Higher have decided to give no credit at all to research conducted in this way. The consequences of putting the bibliometric cart in front of the scientific horse could be disastrous, as insitutions find their involvement in international collaborations dragging them down the league tables. I despair of the obsession with league tables because these rankings involve trying to shoehorn a huge amount of complicated information into a single figure of merit. This is not only pointless, but could also drive behaviours that are destructive to entire disciplines.

That said, there is no denying that particle physicists, cosmology and other disciplines that operate through large teams must share part of the blame. Those involved in these collaborations have achieved brilliant successes through the imagination and resourcefulness of the people involved. Where imagination has failed however is to carry on insisting that the only way to give credit to members of a consortium is by making them all authors of scientific papers. In the example I blogged about a few months ago this blinkered approach generated a paper with more than 5000 authors; of the 33 pages in the article, no fewer than 24 were taken up with the list of authors.

Papers just don’t have five thousand “authors”. I even suspect that only about 1% of these “authors” have even read the paper. That doesn’t mean that the other 99% didn’t do immensely valuable work. It does mean that pretending that they participated in writing the article that describes their work isn’t be the right way to acknowledge their contribution. How are young scientists supposed to carve out a reputation if their name is always buried in immensely long author lists? The very system that attempts to give them credit renders that credit worthless. Instead of looking at publication lists, appointment panels have to rely on reference letters instead and that means early career researchers have to rely on the power of patronage.

As science evolves it is extremely important that the methods for disseminating scientific results evolve too. The trouble is that they aren’t. We remain obsessed with archaic modes of publication, partly because of innate conservatism and partly because the lucrative publishing industry benefits from the status quo. The system is clearly broken, but the scientific community carries on regardless. When there are so many brilliant minds engaged in this sort of research, why are so few willing to challenge an orthodoxy that has long outlived its usefulness. Change is needed, not to make life simpler for the compilers of league tables, but for the sake of science itself.

I’m not sure what is to be done, but it’s an urgent problem which looks set to develop very rapidly into an emergency. One idea appears in a paper on the arXiv with the abstract:

Science and engineering research increasingly relies on activities that facilitate research but are not currently rewarded or recognized, such as: data sharing; developing common data resources, software and methodologies; and annotating data and publications. To promote and advance these activities, we must develop mechanisms for assigning credit, facilitate the appropriate attribution of research outcomes, devise incentives for activities that facilitate research, and allocate funds to maximize return on investment. In this article, we focus on addressing the issue of assigning credit for both direct and indirect contributions, specifically by using JSON-LD to implement a prototype transitive credit system.

I strongly recommend this piece. I don’t think it offers a complete solution, but certainly contains  many interesting ideas. For the situation to improve, however, we have to accept that there is a problem. As things stand, far too many senior scientists are in denial. This has to change.

 

 

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