Issue #75
by Michael Seadle
The problem grows out of how scholars cite papers. As Robert Thibault writes in the LSE Blog: “... we continue to refer to academic outputs as “last-name-of-first-author’s paper…”.¹ This perpetuates old hierarchical traditions where one person gets more recognition than everyone else who contributed to the research and writing. An alternative is a different citation approach: “Several progressive journals now require that their publications describe which author did each of fourteen specific roles. That is to say, they include a Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) statement.”¹ (LINK) This list includes standard author roles like writing the original draft, as well as topics like funding acquisition and project administration that ordinarily get no authorial credit.
The argument for a roles-list is that it resembles a team roster, but the approach fits some subject areas better than others. In large scale natural science projects, for example, tasks like who acquired the funding and who administers the project deserve credit, since without them the research and the writing would not be possible. The team roster fits the humanities and some social sciences less well. In humanities articles, a genuine single author remains the norm, because it is often that one person who gathers the data, does the analysis and writes up the results. Some social sciences sometimes have larger teams, such as psychology, sociology, and economics, but the larger team may just mean more people writing particular segments. An important factor in more humanistic fields is that writing quality makes a significant difference in the likelihood of acceptance, and favours native speakers. The quality of expression matters because the lucidity of an argument matters more in qualitative writing.
As Thibault also points out, publishers have trouble with the concept of group names as authors. He reports that in some cases the group name was dropped or ignored. A degree of cultural shift will be needed before every author and every contributor gets the level of recognition they deserve, but just being aware of the issue is a start.
1: Thibault, Robert. ‘Is Group Authorship a Better Way of Recognising Team-Based Research?’ Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 8 May 2024. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/05/08/is-group-authorship-a-better-way-of-recognising-team-based-research/.