You know the drill: if you aren’t either first author or last author on a journal article in the life sciences, then you’re really not able to use that work as evidence of research independence when you come up for promotion or tenure. In this week’s Nature, Gretchen Kiser of UCSF rails against the semiotics of authorship order. Right now, I’m working on a manuscript in which all the authors are listed alphabetically with the asterisk denoting that we have all contributed equally. But that’s stuff and nonsense also: perfectly equal contributions to a work of scientific research is as rare as the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
I don’t know what the solution to this mess is. As things stand our scientific identification (usually still denoted by our names) is the coin of the realm as far as credit and priority. Team science is indeed growing more common in many fields. As with Michael Lewis’ wonderful book on baseball, Moneyball, we may need new statistics to assess scientific excellence in the future.
Discoverers and Discoveries 