Controversies around the definition of authorship are not exactly new to science. As early as the 17th century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were fighting for the primacy of the invention of calculus – largely because the documentation of the scientific process was still incipient.
With the advent of the scientific article, registering the authorship of ideas became easier, and the concept became central to the organization of the academic community. Authorship of research papers defines virtually all metrics for evaluating scientists, serving as criteria for distributing jobs, funding, and recognition. It is not by chance that a good part of the controversies in the field of scientific integrity revolve around it, as in cases of plagiarism, honorary authorship or disputes between authors.
Having said that, what does it mean to be the author of an article? Authorship in literature has already been problematized by thinkers such as Michel Foucault or Roland Barthes, but establishing it in science is much more difficult. With increasingly complex and collaborative research, scientific work often depends on tens or hundreds of people. Some will remain involved with the project for years, while others will make occasional – but sometimes crucial – contributions. How to draw the imaginary line that determines who is an “author”?
Different areas of research deal with the problem in different ways. Many of them employ the criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which say that an author must fulfill four criteria: (a) contribute substantially to the conception or design of the work, or to the collection, analysis, or interpretation of data; (b) participate in the writing or review of the article; (c) approve the final published version and (d) agree to be responsible for all aspects of the work.
The definition is vague enough to include anyone who has had input at different stages of a project, as what constitutes a “substantial contribution” is quite subjective. But it is also strict enough to exclude someone who, while having collected all the data, has not read the final version of the article. Furthermore, the idea that each author takes responsibility for the whole is untenable – in a project involving experiments with different techniques in multiple laboratories, it is obvious that no one can alone attest to the integrity of everything that has been done.
Perhaps for this reason, strongly collaborative research areas choose to follow different models. Large physics collaborations often publish papers with hundreds or thousands of authors, typically listed in alphabetical order: the Atlas Collaboration’s measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson, for example, lists no fewer than 5,154 of them. The criterion is inclusive, but it is also imprecise, by leveling very different – and not always specified – contributions within the same category of “author”.
But if all definitions seem problematic, isn’t the problem in the concept? In 1997, the then editor of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Drummond Rennie, claimed that authorship had failed. With the advancement of collaborations in science, the model had become outdated and, stretched to its limit, no longer served. Rennie’s proposal was to replace it with a list with the specific contributions of each person involved, which would overcome the dichotomy between being or not being an author.
Twenty-five years later, however, authorship remains firm and strong, which attests that some traditions are difficult to break. The notion that a scientific work has one or more “authors”, on the same model as a literary work, comes from a time when scientists worked alone, or at most in small groups. Determining the author of a scientific work, therefore, was not a problem for much of history.
Until the mid-twentieth century, when science was institutionalized on its current bases, the model of a few authors still dominated most areas of research – and is still in force in some of them. Perhaps this is why narratives about science – or honors like the Nobel Prize – tend to focus on individuals. As such, they are invariably unfair to dozens or hundreds of people who contributed to the discovery process, but do not share the prize with the winners.
Interestingly, opposing traditions exist outside the academic world. In cinema, which also brings together large teams around projects, authorship is resolved in a radically different way. We’re all used to detailed credit lists that make it clear who’s the director, who’s the makeup artist, and who’s the electrician. And the question of who is or is not the author of a film, even if it may exist on a philosophical level, is not of great practical relevance.
The differences are not by chance: unlike science, cinema was born as an industry, due to the extreme technical complexity of filming at the beginning of the 20th century. The idea of ”author cinema” would only emerge later, with the attribution of a certain primacy to the director in this regard – even so, it is obvious that films are the result of many people acting in different roles.
Interestingly, science and cinema evolve in opposite ways – while scientific projects have more and more authors, it is increasingly feasible to make films with small teams. However, neither of the two areas has changed its way of attributing credit: scientists continue to list publications of which they are “authors” without specifying what they have done, while filmmakers only end up achieving a greater degree of “authorship” in a film through the accumulation of functions.
Proposals to change the system abound: CRedIT, for example, is a taxonomy of fourteen generic functions that can be used to describe contributions to a scientific project, and it is increasingly common for such information to be requested when submitting an article. But as long as universities and funding agencies do not stop to look at who did what when distributing positions and resources, it will continue to be a classification for English ver.
The situation will only change when the academic world admits that adapting its modus operandi the division of functions is imperative to deal with increasingly complex projects. By recognizing the authorship of articles as the only form of contribution, the system not only errs in the attribution of credit, but also hinders innovation in the organization of scientific work.
Scientists who collect data, for example, today have little incentive to share it for others to analyze, since authorship of data – as opposed to articles – is often invisible to institutions and funders. Researchers who want to specialize in specific functions – whether performing experiments, managing projects or analyzing data – do not find compatible careers, due to the archaic model of the scientist who does everything himself.
Again, you don’t have to look far to see what other forms of organization are possible. As much as film students acquire general notions about audiovisual production, they are more likely to end up working in specialized roles. The reason is that the market knows how to recognize good specialists: not by chance, the Hollywood academy offers Oscars for a multitude of technical categories, and no one seems to complain that their winners are not the authors of the films. And even if it is possible to make original films with minimal teams, nobody would try to produce a blockbuster in that model.
In the other academy, we remain obsessed with the model of the 19th century scientist, capable of being a screenwriter, director, editor and producer at the same time. Which can continue to exist, but it is insufficient to build a robust science on its own. Maybe it’s time to learn from the movies and institute jobs – and awards – for good microscopists, data analysts or project managers. Only then will we stop slapping each other in futile authorship disputes, and create work structures compatible with 21st century science.
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Olavo Amaral is a professor at the Institute of Medical Biochemistry Leopoldo de Meis at UFRJ and coordinator of the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative.
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