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当代科研论文怎么署名才合适？
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Some thoughts after reading 作者的贡献度 by 武夷山.
I would like to share some of my own experience and observation on this sensitive issue. I don’t want to be too revealing since I am still an active researcher in the field; however, I see faces when I write each of the following stories. (Warning: If you are to name the names in your public comments on this Blog, I will delete them.)
In physical oceanography, a “common” rule is whoever writes the paper gets to be the first author. You may disagree, but knowing how hard it is to draft, revise, revise, and revise a manuscript, not to mention dealing with other big (editor’s rejection and reviewers’ comments) and small (getting all the references right and uploading files for online submission) issues, I will be happy NOT to be the first author.
My first co-authored paper was published in 1992, which was written (and typed word by word) by my PH.D thesis advisor, McCreary. I confess that I was bored to death, since he cared not only about words but punctuations! What I didn’t realized then was how valuable that experience was to me later on. In fact, I can say without any doubt that I have the confidence to be a “non-native” English editor because of that experience and many more co-writing of research papers with him. McCreary is one of the best writers in the field. We joke about not many colleagues write more than one paper with him, because it is just too hard work. Try it if you don’t believe me.
Does thesis advisor deserve to be the first author? It depends. In my case, I was the second author for my first English publication, which was fair because I didn’t write it (and didn’t know how to write an excellent paper then). My second paper was written by me, though heavily edited by my advisor, so I was the first author. I did hear a story from a former colleague (who is no longer in the field) that her advisor changed his mind after he asked her to write the paper: “You need to write it if you want to be the first author.” I could not think of a reason why she would lie about such a thing because she already quit the field when she told us the story. In fact, her advisor is well-known, and had another complaint from his former student before this incident.
Can it be difficult to rank the authors? Yes, sometimes. Dr. X may have the idea, Dr. Y may be the PI who obtains the grant for the research project, and Dr. Z can be the workhorse who gets his hands all sore daily (from running numerical models, debugging codes, and analyzing output). So, personally I agree the person who writes the paper should be the first author, and the rest should be ordered according to their contributions or simply according to their last names (a bad practice for me though).
Should authorship be a “gift”? No, but it happens. A colleague was “given” two papers when he was applying for a new position because he “needed help with his publication record.” I was the first author of one of those two papers, and I knew he didn’t deserve to be on at least one. Why didn’t I object? At that time, I was only thinking “what a gentleman Dr. Zee was” because he was the second author. If he didn’t ask me to add a third author, the paper would be cited as “Yu and Zee.” By adding a third author, it would become “Yu et al.” What I did was wrong, but I was “young.”
Should one co-author 20 papers each year? It depends. If a colleague of mine publishes 20 papers each year, he will be noticed but not necessary in a positive way. (I don’t understand why some people want to have so many papers.)
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