#hyperauthorship

On Hyperauthorship @ConversationUK #HigherEd

I‘ve neglected this blog of late, but there’s been lots of activity elsewhere (don’t miss the latest posts here).

Today in The Conversation UK, my piece on hyperauthorship… what happens to the concept of ‘author’ when articles creidt thousands of authors? Read here.

If you find it interesting, please share the link! ;-)

Cronin, B. (2005). Hyperauthorship. In The hand of science: Academic writing and its rewards (pp. 41-70). Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

“Foucault (1977, 126), in fact, talks of scientific texts “accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification”…”reluctant authorship… was a standard trope of early modern culture” (Shapin 1995, 178)

…a great deal of the scholarly literature is the product of a “socio-technical production and communications network” (Kling et al. 2000), which brings together a mix of actors, resources, tools, and rules.

The traditional notion of “authorship” relies on a comprehensible responsibility and ownership network of no more than a few co-authors (ideally a single author) and that, since publications in many fields are now rarely authored by fewer than 4 or 5 authors and often dozens or hundreds, it is effectively impossible to assign credit or responsibility in an accurate way. As an alternative to the traditional, discipline-specific practices of author ordering on papers, he discusses a “radical” alternative of assigning contribution roles to each person involved in the production of a publication which clearly link individuals to the part of the work for which they claim responsibility and credit. Such a system could potentially remove readers’ focus from the title of an author and direct it to their actual stake in the research.

High Energy Physics and Biomedicine are the largest loci of hyper authorship but Biomedicine is producing scholarship about the process and exploring ways to assign due credit and discourage various fraudulent authorship practices—however, the same is not true of HEP, which Cronin believes practices a stringent internal vetting process and the nature of such distributed work is that transparency and trust of the data (as well as understanding of whose work produced each datum) is absolutely required—therefore, researchers must be acutely aware of each others’ contributions and the authorship of the papers published in HEP is less problematic than those in Biomedicine (where the actual authors of the paper may be only a small number of the research team, if they were involved in the research at all).

In cases where papers with many authors are brought into question, sometimes all authors claim that their involvement was so specialized to one area that they cannot be held accountable for the paper—resulting in the paper acquiring “orphan” status (Rennie and Flanagin 1994, 469). 

Simply capping the number of allowable authors could mean that individuals may have no proof of their meaningful contributions or that, once the limit has been reached, most researchers would be unwilling to contribute. Guidelines for what authors must contribute are also likely to be misinterpreted or ignored by authors.

Guidelines for authorship in the ICMJE’s (1977) principles of authorship (from the fifth edition of the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals):

Authors must make “substantial contributions to ALL of the following:

The conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data;

Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content

Final approval of the version to be published

Cronin’s final point, which is borrowed from Biagioli (2003, 274) is a great summary of his research— “scientific authorship, whatever shape it might take in the future, will remain tied to specific disciplinary ecologies.” Each discipline has a history and a sociology that will make it basically impossible to impose a single new authorship practice on all disciplines.

Options for further reading:

Barthes, R. (1977). The death of the author. In Barthes, R. Image, Music, Text. Essays selected and translated by S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 142-148.