Posted by RPM on January 22, 2007 I got my motherboard replaced a couple of hours ago, so I now have my old forms of procrastination at my disposal — blogging and blog reading.
I’ve got one link for you that is relevant to Gregg Easterbrook’s anti-multi-author screed. This one comes from BioCurious; it’s an article on attributing credit in multi-author papers. Enjoy.
There definitely needs to be a standard author credit culture, and the one the article uses, SDC (sequence determines credit) sounds like a more logical order than the typical biology “distance from center of author list determines credit” (or FLAE as they call it).
But there’s a funny story about my brush with author order — Despite being a biologist, I did a postdoc in a Computer Science department and as part of my work there I contributed a small amount to a mostly CS paper. So, following their credit culture, I was assigned last author (because I contributed the least). But after the paper was published, I was asked to be on the committee for a bioinformatics conference — it turned out later that the organizers assumed that my last author position meant that I was a PI!
January 22, 2007