Credit Where Credit is Due
By: Vincent Vanhoucke
Tags: Publishing, Science, Academia, Research

Credit Where Credit is Due

Navigating Academic Credit and Authorship

Credit assignment and decisions about paper authorship are a surprisingly difficult topic to navigate, particularly for junior researchers. I distinctly recall working really hard on my first paper, reflexively listing myself as last author — given my initials, I’m accustomed to being last on lists of names — and discovering through the oblique comments of my co-authors that name ordering on papers was actually a thing. That notion seemed rather comical to me at the time, but I quickly learned that people, bizarrely, really cared about it.

General Principles

Most professional organizations have a standard for authorship (for instance ACM, IEEE, APA, ICMJE). At my own institution, the golden rule is:

‘Fairness, leaning on the side of inclusiveness.’

This broad, purposely non-specific policy lets researchers decide on which standards, often set by their own community, to adhere to. We also provide researchers with a mechanism to seek advice and handle escalations. Standards vary in subtle ways, from whether being an active writer of the paper is a necessary condition for authorship, to practices surrounding acknowledgments and citations.

My central advice to junior researchers is to talk about credit assignment: talk about it early, and repeat the conversation as often as needed.

‘Success is directly proportional to how many awkward conversations you’re willing to have’ — Tim Ferriss

Most issues I have encountered have to do with mismatched expectations: ‘You said I would be a co-author / But you did nothing / But you said…’, or ‘You submitted this without acknowledging me?!’. Talking about it is the best antidote. Early conversations about authorship need not be understood as contracts: things change, people get busy with other things, and new people join in. This is why making a habit of having those conversations regularly is helpful, as long as everyone involved is willing to engage, as they should. One thing that greatly helps grounding these conversations is shared progress documents, where everyone’s input into the project is documented along the way.

And these are difficult conversations! Some would say ‘Crucial Conversations.’ It is very tempting to procrastinate on having them, thus missing the chance to uncover problems early. I have seen cases where the author list would only be settled on the day the camera-ready paper was due, which puts an inordinate amount of stress on collaborators, particularly those in junior roles.

There is no universal template on how to have those conversations, as much depends on the respective roles of the participants and how mature the work is at the time. A good place to start is as soon as a narrative for the research starts taking shape. As collaborators start discussing the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of a potential publication, it is an opportunity to steer the conversation towards the ‘who’ as well, while setting the expectation that this will be an ongoing process.

Associating your name with any body of work should not be taken lightly. Use acknowledgements liberally — being acknowledged on someone’s work is generally an appreciated recognition, but never acknowledge or add someone as a co-author on a paper without asking them first. There are a number of people who take steps to not have their name or affiliation publicized online, and it is important to respect their choice of privacy. I have also declined to be co-author on papers I had nominally made contributions to because I disagreed with the quality of the outcome or value of the work as a standalone publication. Note also that the authorship standards on patent filings tend to be much more stringent than on academic publications, since having a co-inventor on a patent to be shown to not have participated in the invention may be grounds for invalidating the patent altogether.

Common Patterns

There are some common scenarios that tend to be fertile sources of questions around credit. One is the role of team managers, leads or otherwise academic advisors. Simply put, in my team, we don’t practice ‘honorary authorship.’ Leads should not be added as authors for providing headcount, funding, attending meetings or merely having a pulse. There are intangible contributions such as steering the research, advising or enabling it organizationally in specific ways that can be worthy of recognition, but I don’t believe that the all-too-common practice of adding the lab leads on every paper is healthy, especially since it cheapens somewhat the contributions of senior team members.

Another question that comes up often is how to recognize the impact of software engineers who contributed infrastructure in support of the research. Any engineering work that is specifically done in the service of a research project is unequivocally grounds to be invited to contribute to the paper. Work that is more horizontal, and contributes to multiple projects without specialization such as tooling and frameworks, is generally worth acknowledging or citing when there is a corresponding publication. It is worth noting that academic credit, for those who haven’t built their career around research outcomes, is not uniformly valued. It is important to try and understand how to reward one’s work in ways that matter to them.

The issue of prior art is another common one, particularly when it comes to building on top of one of your colleagues’ work, for which they may feel some degree of ownership. The general standard here is that any published work is grounds for a citation, not co-authorship. Demanding to be co-author on any derivative of one’s work is a common impulse, but is to be resisted unless it involves unpublished work. Many communities try to normalize for that by measuring impact by the number of non-self citations, though that standard is not uniformly applied.

On the flip side, use of specific, actionable, and previously unpublished ideas warrants the individual who came up with the idea to be invited to co-author a paper. Issues tend to arise when people seek credit for general concepts that they have shared, but not developed further than merely discussing them at a high level. It is easy to write down and circulate an idea, without qualifying or attempting to publish it, in the hopes that perhaps someone else will work on something similar and who is now duty bound to credit you. But this is a very damaging dynamic, particularly in greenfield areas where there are many ‘obvious’ ideas to try and the hard work is to qualify and validate them. My antidote to this is to consider any claim of prior art on generic, non-specific ideas to be grounds for an acknowledgment, not co-authorship. It is a delicate balance because you want to still incentivize the free flow of ideas, but not to the extent that every embryo of a concept coming out of one’s mouth becomes a flag planted in the research landscape that says ‘keep out or give me credit.’

In large teams, with long-running efforts involving a number of people and aspects to a problem, one very common struggle is the issue of optimizing for credit being attributed to the team at large versus the desire for smaller parts of the effort to publish more quickly on their own sliver of the issue. There is often a temptation to ‘self-scoop’: quickly publish a paper that either competes with a larger effort, solves a part of it without addressing the larger scope of the project, or uses new infrastructure built for the project that is unpublished. It is one of the few cases where perfectly solid and publishable research may need to be held back, and the larger project’s interests might rightfully preempt the interests of a few.

Unconscious Biases and Incentives

I find it very useful to try and understand what implicit biases and incentives may be at play when collaborating on a project because it is easy to unwittingly create a difficult situation out of the best of intentions. Picture for instance:

A senior contributor adds a second junior contributor to project, threatening ‘first authorship’, Conversely, a junior member seeks advice from another senior contributor, threatening ‘last authorship’, A collaborator adds #Celebrity to the project, delighted to get a chance at co-authoring a paper with them. Other team members are unhappy because it is now a ‘#Celebrity project’ and their own contributions will be eclipsed, The authors agree on author order upfront on the basis of certain expectations, but the project evolves, Aaron Aappy suggests alphabetical ordering, Zoe Zzzywk is not amused.

In many fields, Ph.D.s are made out of first-author papers, tenure cases out of last-author papers, and the number of shots one has at building one’s portfolio is limited, creating strong incentives in favor of or against certain types of collaborations. There are many other ways one’s personal history can come to bear into someone’s perspective on fairness: if you are from an underrepresented group in your field, maybe ‘equal authorship’ doesn’t feel as equal to you. Or if you’re an engineer whose contributions to research efforts have been overlooked in the past, a mere acknowledgment of your work, as opposed to co-authorship, may feel like yet another slight.

This is why I emphasize talking about those issues openly in a workgroup from the start because as long as those biases remain unconscious, to yourself as well as to others, they get in the way of even defining what fairness means for everyone. No matter how much we want to think that fairness can be objectively defined, it largely remains a largely subjective measure in this context.

Credit is not an additive quantity

A final common cognitive bias I encounter often is this notion that adding another author to a paper always dilutes one’s contributions, as if credit was a fixed pie that was to be carved between co-authors. This is completely untrue: nobody will care if you’re co-author on a 4-person or a 5-person paper — it may well be quite the opposite in the context of single-author papers. In fact, if you have a very well-established researcher as a co-author, to some extent they may lend your paper credibility, effectively adding to the overall credit pie more than they take away.

The Difficult Cases

There are also many ways things can get complicated in a less benign manner. Picture these:

Alice presents some ideas at the team meeting. Months later, Bob submits a paper on a very similar idea. Alice was not aware. Advisor suggests a set of projects. Alice and Bob independently pick up on the same idea and, without speaking to each other, independently run with it. Bob starts a collaboration with Alice, but doesn’t find time to work on it. The paper is written before he gets a chance to free up enough time to contribute. Bob suggests an idea. Alice says ‘I had the same idea a few months ago, let me write it up’, and quickly produces a document describing the idea. Alice and Bob, first and second authors respectively, submit a paper to a conference but it gets rejected. Alice has other things to do but Bob works with Chris, revise it substantially, resubmit and it gets accepted. Bob does a lot of work for the project, but the work doesn’t end up getting included in the write-up.

In each of these scenarios, there is a natural setup for conflicting perspectives, or room for actual blame, and the right thing to do may depend on a number of factors. This can be where having frank conversations, ones that include both facts and people’s interpretations and feelings surrounding those facts, matters the most. This is also where some form of independent adjudication may become particularly useful.

Questions of authorship can also ultimately be one of those decision points where getting to a degree of closure that is acceptable to everyone involved is more important than the actual outcome. Push comes to shove, tossing a coin is not the worst way, if it comes to that, to yield a decision. In particular, it doesn’t come with the ‘baggage’ of rationalizing why a specific decision was made, and enables everyone to move on.

Should I Care?

Many would regard issues around authorship as petty and unworthy of their attention. I’ll admit to being in that camp for much of my career, focus a lot more on moving the scientific needle rather than the details of credit appropriation. But as my role grew into becoming a research lead, I got to appreciate how much the fact that not wanting to care didn’t absolve me from paying attention, because it genuinely matters to others around me, and for reasons that I can’t simply dismiss out of hand. As much as I’d love for ego and career development to be merely secondary to the drive toward exceptional research outcomes, I understand that they themselves also fuel a large fraction of scientific progress.

People respond to a wide palette of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, but their self-image tends to always be at the very center of their motivation, and there is no escaping the fact that seeing one’s name recognized in the public sphere is an important part of it. So I’ve turned around and decided that embracing people’s desire for appropriate and fair recognition and that helping promote fairness and transparency in academic credit was worthy of attention, if only so that people’s attention may be confidently redirected to the more important questions of producing good science together. If good fences make good neighbors, fair and inclusive credit makes good research, and that’s reason enough to care.

Thanks to Aleksandra Faust for helping put together the material this article is based on, and to Joyce Noah-Vanhoucke for extensive editing.