In some sciences there are established rules for the role of the principal investigator (first author) and the last author. In the life sciences at least it’s often enough to be the head of a laboratory whose equipment was used to get on a publication, no additional input required.
Why would you want to hide that information, or does your proposal encompass only all the middle authors / “contributors” (often well over a dozen)?
Mu; I don’t want to hide that information. The cultural traditions (calling them “established rules” is a stretch when there’s so little agreement about what they are) surrounding authorship hides them in a lossy format while causing at least thousands of scientist-hours of drama a year. If authors want to explicitly flag down who did what, they can do it somewhere in the article proper.
A possible counter-argument would be that employers want to see, e.g., how many papers a given research has been the PI on, without reading the article proper. The current system already doesn’t work for that use case; the status fighting over first authorship has created the ridiculous notion of “co-first-authorship” and false declarations that “Dr. X and Dr. Y contributed equally to this project.”
In some sciences there are established rules for the role of the principal investigator (first author) and the last author. In the life sciences at least it’s often enough to be the head of a laboratory whose equipment was used to get on a publication, no additional input required.
Why would you want to hide that information, or does your proposal encompass only all the middle authors / “contributors” (often well over a dozen)?
Mu; I don’t want to hide that information. The cultural traditions (calling them “established rules” is a stretch when there’s so little agreement about what they are) surrounding authorship hides them in a lossy format while causing at least thousands of scientist-hours of drama a year. If authors want to explicitly flag down who did what, they can do it somewhere in the article proper.
A possible counter-argument would be that employers want to see, e.g., how many papers a given research has been the PI on, without reading the article proper. The current system already doesn’t work for that use case; the status fighting over first authorship has created the ridiculous notion of “co-first-authorship” and false declarations that “Dr. X and Dr. Y contributed equally to this project.”