Ethical Guidelines for Authorship & Responsible Research, Papers of Introduction to Philosophy

Download Ethical Guidelines for Authorship & Responsible Research and more Papers Introduction to Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity! 1 Authorship 1 v. 9 James R. Wilson, Wes Snyder, Lonnie Balaban, Gary Comstock ABSTRACT: We explore the ethical issues surrounding responsible authorship and follow the contributorship model which offers three criteria every author must meet: 1) Make substantial contributions to the conception, design, acquisition, or the analysis and interpretation of data; 2) Either help draft the article or revise its content critically; 2) Approve, and be willing to defend, the final version published. Keywords: authorship principles 1. Why authorship is important Who is entitled to be listed as an author of a scholarly article? May authors exclude someone who has made a significant intellectual contribution to the work? How are authors different from contributors? Whose names should be placed in the acknowledgments? How should order be established in the byline? We will return to these questions after a brief comment about the importance of writing papers. After you have completed your research you must write up the findings and share them with others; knowledge grows only when each researcher communicates their results with others. You will have many opportunities to share results, beginning with your lab’s informal team meetings and departmental seminars to more formal presentations at regional and national conferences. Communicating your results also gives you a documented record of contributing to the advance of knowledge, a record that critical to the advancement of your career. Authoring peer reviewed articles provides hard evidence that you can write well and earn the trust of your colleagues. Some people fear the challenges facing the scientific journal article due to the immense ability to collect and review data via technology, the collaborative nature of 21st century science, and the speed at which recent data published on the internet may overwrite previous findings (Cronin, pg.56) Yet, the overworked slogan “publish or perish” suggests that authorship of an article is the most prized form of expressing results, and researchers all ages rely on publications to continue to advance their careers.2 According to S.L. Montgomery (2003) in The Chicago guide to Communication Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press,) “there are no boundaries, no walls, between the doing of science and the communication of it; communicating is the doing of science Your success as a researcher, not to mention your chances of improving your job prospects, requires that you learn well the rules and conventions of authorship. 2 2. Why authorship is complicated In past centuries, articles were mostly written by single researchers acting on their own. Deciding who was entitled to be an author was less of a problem and easier to give proper credit to everyone involved. Unfortunately, as research becomes more complex and interdisciplinary, the answer becomes increasingly complicated. Hollywood’s image of the lone scientist bent over a workbench late at night is anachronistic. In fact, scores of individuals often cooperate to produce 21st century research. While the size of research teams varies from discipline to discipline--some fields in the humanities continue to work on the single-researcher model and many articles in philosophy and history continue to be single-author works—research in most fields of science and engineering typically involve more than one person and discipline. In recent years, there has been a rapid proliferation of large, interdisciplinary research teams writing articles with tens or even hundreds of potential authors; in high energy physics it is not unusual to find articles with dozens of authors. “A High Statistics Study of the Decay τ−->π−π0 ντ” lists more than 250 authors.3 But today, authorship is a much more complex issue. Should someone be listed because he/she supplied equipment or a stain of bacteria for experiments? (One is reminded of the lauded DNA discovers Francis Crick and James Watson who downplayed the contributions of Rosalind Franklin in their famous Nature article, even though Franklin’s photographs of the double helix launched their success. She didn’t rate a byline, but was rather cordially thanked.) Should the director of the lab--whose only contribution was to secure funding for the project—be added to the list? What about other senior figures whose names would add prestige? Should undergraduates who have contributed to the work but may not fully understand its results be added as “honorary” authors? Just who is entitled to be an author? More than ever, we need explicit answers to this question. Blaise Cronin (2005) writes in The Hand of Science: Academic Writing and its Rewards, “Historically authorship imp0lied writing. Today, the concept of authorship has expanded to accommodate a diverse array of contribvutions and inputs, some of which may require little or no engagement with the text qua text.”pg.55 With large complicated science projects come many individuals performing large or small contributions to the whole. It is not surprising that authorship disputes are occurring more frequently (14, 16). So, who is responsible for the work, and exactly who should get the credit? Can you be an author without writing a word? 3. Why we must talk about authorship Common sense holds that anyone who makes a significant contribution to the work being reported deserves to be an author. But what does “significant contribution” mean? Common sense does not provide a clear answer this question. And yet providing an answer is critical to the continued success of a research team. Consider the consequences of not doing so. One of the most famous researchers of the last two decades is Ian Wilmut, creator of the first cloned sheep. Dolly, whose birth appeared in the media all over the world, was described in a seminal 1997 paper in Nature. Almost ten years after Dolly’s birth, however, Wilmut’s team is embroiled in controversy over the order of authors of the paper (Sample, 2006.Guardian) 5 In the second category is writing: drafting, rewriting, revising, and reviewing the manuscript. ICMJE believes that participating in this process is necessary, not optional, for authorship. Who produced the first “dirty” draft? Who reworked and reorganized the material for coherence and precision. Who revised the piece for ease of readability? In the third category is the responsibility for, and the right to, approve the final draft. As revisions are made, the claims made in manuscripts can change in subtle but significant ways. Every author must be given the opportunity to read the final version carefully, and should be prepared to defend that version in public. Authors must meet 1, 2, and 3. Each author must have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the work. These guidelines suggest that every person listed as an author must have participated in the research by providing intellectual input, writing, and review of the manuscript. When research involves large groups of individuals and centers, the group itself should take responsibility for identifying authors. The same criteria apply; only individuals meeting all three criteria--including willingness to accept direct responsibility for the manuscript--should be listed. ICMJE recommends that the order of authors be a joint decision of all co-authors, and that the group be prepared to explain the order.1 6. Who does not deserve to be an author Contributors who do not meet all three criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgment section. This category can acknowledge those who provided technical help, writing assistance, individuals such as department chairs who provided general support, and other individuals, institutions, or agencies contributing financial or material support. The function played by each person may be specified, such as clinical or participating investigator, “served as scientific advisor,” “critically reviewed the study proposal,” “collected data,” or “provided and cared for study patients.” Accordingly, no one is entitled to authorship if they have only contributed to one or two of the three categories. Rather, authorship "requires two or three, the appropriate minimum depending on individual circumstances, such as the number of authors." From a larger perspective, an even more serious problem in such situations is the lack of a clear- cut assignment of responsibility among all the potential authors for ensuring the integrity of the entire article and for answering any questions about the article that may arise after publication. These issues have led many scientists and scientific editors to propose alternatives to the traditional model for authorship outlined above. In particular, Rennie, Yank, and Emanuel (14) proposed replacing the concept of an author with the concept of a contributor whose role in the work is precisely specified in a footnote to the published paper; moreover in the same footnote at least one contributor (usually a coinvestigator) is designated as a guarantor for the integrity of 1 Visit <http://www.icmje.org/> for the latest updates to these requirements. 6 the article as a whole. Davidoff (16) asserts that full disclosure of the contributions of each collaborator merely ensures that the same high standards for accurately reporting the scientific information in the article are also applied in the assignment of credit and accountability for the work. 7. What is a contributorship plan? To follow up a 1996 conference held in England “Is it time for a new approach to authorship?”, the Council of Science Editors (CSE) convened a Task Force on Authorship where a paper written by Paul J. Friedman (1999), suggested researchers provide a modified copyright form which would be filled out an signed by all the authors. “A new standard for authorship” proposed a check-off list. Friedman, an MD from University of California, suggested that contributions of the individuals associated with a manuscript be published to document the byline. Authors would check off the contribution categories and sign the form. The form lists relevant activities: concept, design, supervision, resources, material, data collection/processing, analysis/interpretation, literature search,writing, critical review, and other. CSE reports that several journals have implemented the contributorship plan in slight different form and are collecting information about how well the system works.(www.coucilscience editors.org/authorship.cfm?) The selection of authors for a paper should be jointly agreed by all of the collaborators on a project as soon as the group has decided on the assignment of responsibilities and workload for all members of the group. Considerations of the division of labor naturally lead to the question of who shall be the primary or lead author 8. Principles of Primary Authorship The primary author is the author listed first in the article’s byline. That person must have demonstrated the ability and willingness to exert intellectual leadership of the project so as to (a) assume responsibility for a major professional aspect of the work, and (b) ensure that all the project objectives are met. Thus the primary author of a paper is generally chosen based on an evaluation of that individual’s contributions to the conception, planning, and execution of the study. Selection of the primary author often occurs after the experimental work has been performed but just before the paper is written. If two or more authors have contributed equally to the project, then the primary author should be the one who by mutual consent actually coordinates the overall writing of the paper. According to Houk and Thacker (14), individuals who satisfy one or more of the following criteria should be considered as candidates for primary authorship: • Originality of contribution—the primary author made an original theoretical or methodological contribution that proved to be a highly important basis for the paper. • Major intellectual input—throughout the study, the primary author generated ideas on the study design and modifications, on ensuring availability and use of appropriate experimental subjects or material, on productively conducting the study, on solving measurement problems, on analyzing and interpreting data in a particular way, and on preparing reports. • Major feature of the manuscript—the primary author originated and developed the feature of the paper that is of central importance. 7 • Greatest overall contribution—the primary author did the most work, made the study succeed, provided intellectual leadership, and analyzed and interpreted the data. No one is entitled to primary authorship solely because of administrative position or expertise in a particular subject or discipline. Selection of the primary author should reflect a consensus of the paper’s coauthors on the most deserving individual. For the alternative contributorship model of collaboration, Rennie, Yank, and Emanuel (14) and Davidoff (16) recommend that in arriving at mutually agreed-upon descriptions of their individual contributions to the paper, the collaborators should also arrive at a mutually agreed- upon ranking of the relative importance of those contributions; and this ranking should be used to determine the order of contributors in the byline and in the contributors list. Note that other designations such as first author, senior author, corresponding author, and last author are sometimes used to show different divisions of responsibility than were described above for the primary author (18). For example, the senior author may be a faculty adviser (mentor) who coordinated the overall writing of a paper on a student’s doctoral dissertation research, with the student listed as the first author, followed by any other members of the student’s supervisory committee who played a significant role in the work, and with the senior author listed last. The term primary author is used in this paper to simplify the discussion. 9. Pitfalls to avoid An auctorial pitfall complementary to underreporting of research results is overselling such results—that is, the increasingly common tendency for authors to indulge in rhetorical exaggeration of the merits of their work while eschewing an exhaustive discussion of the deficiencies of that work Furthermore: Over the past twenty years, I have accumulated considerable experience in mediating extremely acrimonious disputes between researchers acting as “severe Popperian critics” of each other’s work. Much of this hard-won experience was gained during the nine years that I served as a departmental editor and former departmental editor of the journal Management Science. To avoid reopening wounds which have not had much time to heal, I will not go into the particulars of any of these cases; but I feel compelled to draw some general conclusions based on these cases. In every one of the disputes that I mediated, the trouble started with extensive claims about the general applicability of some simulation-based methodology; and then failing to validate these claims independently, reviewers and other researchers proceeded to write up and disseminate their conclusions. This in turn generated a heated counterreaction, usually involving claims of technical incompetence or theft of ideas or both. Early in my career I served as the “special prosecutor” in several of these cases. Later on I moved up to become the “judge,” and in the end I was often forced to play the role of the “jury” as well. In every one of these cases, ultimately the truth emerged (as it must, of course)—but the process of sorting things out involved the expenditure of massive amounts of time and energy on the part of many dedicated individuals in the simulation community, not to mention the numerous professional and personal relationships that were severely damaged along the way. (23, p. 1410) 10 That depends on where the work was previously published, and who the copyright holder is. If you simply copy some segment of work you previously did, you should state where it is copied from. For example: “… in our earlier work published in the Journal of Unverifiable Experiments, we said ‘Cold Fusion is Hot’ [Snyder, 98]”. For more extensive quotes, over a page, or a figure, (or a poem of whatever length) you should gain permission of the copyright holder. The IEEE policy on this topic states that an author may use his/her work again, provided it is cited. • What about publications by authors who work for the US federal government? In general, such publications may not by copyrighted, and you may copy, for example, a figure from such a publication without requesting permission. However, you still need to say “from the IEEE Transactions on Eggplant Engineering”, you just don’t have to add “used with permission”. Any time US government employees publish papers, they must include a disclaimer which says that copyrights are not owned by the publisher. Some other governments may have similar policies — I have not been able to sample every country. However, my colleagues from Europe and Japan tell me that the US seems to be unique in this aspect. In most other countries at least, copyrights are owned by the publication and/or the author, and not by the government. • What about web publications? The problem with web publications is that the authors usually do not identify whether or not the publication is copyrighted or not. The author may have taken a figure from his/her publication in a journal (which is copyrighted) and put it on the web page. You must make every effort to track down the actual copyright holder. It is not always easy to do that (I once encountered a case where the copyright holder had died, and I had to contact the heirs), but you need to try very hard. • And what happens if I don’t follow these guidelines? My [Wes Snyder’s] definition of an unethical act is one which results in, or potentially results in hurting someone else. If you don t follow these guidelines, first of all you are hurting someone else, and that’s what is really important. But here’s an interesting (more-or-less true) story that carries consequences a bit further. Graduate student Y, working for Professor X, told his professor he had developed a grand idea and written a paper about it for submission to the IEEE Transactions on Eggplant Engineering. The paper, with both names as authors, was accepted and the paper published. Immediately after publication, the editor of Trans. EE received a letter pointing out that the entire paper had been copied verbatim from another publication. The Transactions inserted a preface to the electronic version of the paper from its web page stating that the paper by X and Y had originally been published elsewhere and stated the name and issue of the publication and the names of the actual authors. The Transactions also published an apology to its readership in the next issue. The 11 professor, who was innocent of plagiarism (but not of bad judgment) suffered a serious career blow. We won’t go into what happened to the graduate student. 12 REFERENCES (FROM WILSON) 1. Feynman, Richard P. (1985) “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character, W. W. Norton & Co., New York. 2. Langmuir, Irving, and Hall, Robert N. (1989) Pathological science, Physics Today 42: 36–48. 3. Nye, Mary Jo (1980) N-rays: An episode in the history and psychology of science, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 11: 127–156. 4. Wood, Robert W. (1904) The n-rays, Nature 70: 530–531. 5. Huizenga, John R. (1993) Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century, Oxford University Press, New York. 6. Fleischmann, Martin, and Pons, Stanley (1989a) Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 261: 301–308. 7. Fleischmann, Martin, and Pons, Stanley (1989b) Errata, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 263: 187–188. 8. Glass, B. (1965) The ethical basis of science, Science 150: 1254–1261. 9. Bronowski, J. (1965) Science and Human Values, rev. ed., Harper & Row, New York. 10. CBE Style Manual Committee (1983) CBE Style Manual: A Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers in the Biological Sciences, 5th ed. rev. and expanded, Council of Biology Editors, Bethesda, Md. 11. CBE Style Manual Committee (1994) Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 6th ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 12. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (1997) Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals, Journal of the American Medical Association 277: 927–934. 13. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2001) Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals [online], available online via <www.icmje.org> [accessed February 10, 2002]. 14. Rennie, Drummond, Yank, Veronica, and Emanuel, Linda (1997) When authorship fails: A proposal to make contributors accountable, Journal of the American Medical Association 278: 579–585. 15. Houk, V. N., and Thacker, S. B. (1990) The responsibilities of authorship, in: CBE Editorial Policy Committee, eds. Ethics and Policy in Scientific Publication, Council of Biology Editors, Bethesda, Md., pp. 181–184. 16. Davidoff, Frank (2000) Who’s the author: Problems with biomedical authorship, and some possible solutions, Science Editor 23: 111–119. 17. Taylor, Craig (1999) The cold fusion debacle, presented at Research Ethics Institute, 13–16 June, at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina. 18. Macrina, Francis L. (2000) Scientific Integrity: An Introductory Text with Cases, 2d ed., ASM Press, Washington, D.C. 19. Wilson, James R. (2001) Some guidelines on technical writing [online], Department of Industrial Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, available as <http://www.ie.ncsu.edu/jwilson/guide.html> [accessed February 26, 2002]. 20. Chalmers, I. (1991) Underreporting research is scientific misconduct, in: Peer Review in Scientific Publishing: Papers from the First International Congress on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication, Council of Biology Editors, Chicago, pp. 169–177, also available as: Chalmers, I. (1990) Underreporting research is scientific misconduct, Journal of the American Medical Association 263: 1405–1408. 21. Woodward, James, and Goodstein, David (1996) Conduct, misconduct and the structure of science, American Scientist 84: 479–490. 22. Medawar, Peter B. (1979) Advice to a Young Scientist, BasicBooks, New York. 23. Wilson, James R. (1997) Doctoral colloquium keynote address: Conduct, misconduct, and cargo cult science, in: Andradóttir, S., Healy, K. J., Withers, D. H., and Nelson, B. L., eds. Proceedings of 15 Notes 1 This article is itself a study in authorship. It is based on two previously published works. The ur-source is James R. Wilson’s web-based paper, “Responsible authorship and peer review,” http://www.chass.ncsu.edu/ethics/inst_mod/authorship.pdf . The e-article appears in slightly different form as Wilson, J. R. 2002. Responsible authorship and peer review. Science and Engineering Ethics 8 (2): 155–174. Available as: PDF file [accessed August 23, 2005]. Sections are reprinted here with permission of the copyright holder. The second source is Wesley E. Snyder, “Publication Ethics: A Common Sense Guide” originally published in the June 2004 issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. © 2004 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. http://www.ncsu.edu/IEEE- RAS/RAS/RASnews/041107PubEthicsGuide.htm Reprinted in its entirety here with permission of copyright holder. Wilson’s original article appeared with the following Acknowledgment: “This work was supported by NSF Grant SES-9818359. Special thanks go to Tom Regan, Rebeca Rufty, Margaret King, and Nell Kriesberg (North Carolina State University) for many enlightening conversations on research ethics. Thanks also go to Stephanie Bird (MIT), Frank Davidoff (Executive Editor, Institute for Healthcare Improvement; Editor Emeritus, Annals of Internal Medicine), and the anonymous referees for numerous suggestions that substantially improved this paper.” Balaban and Comstock added additional content and bridge material. 2 One can say that if you don’t write up and publish your work in order to share the findings with scientific colleagues, then it is as if you hadn’t done anything at all. Communicating your work to others is paramount. According to S.L. Montgomery (2003) in The Chicago guide to Communication Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press,) “there are no boundaries, no walls, between the doing of science and the communication of it; communicating is the doing of science.” 3 http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ex/pdf/0512/0512071.pdf 4 ICMJE adopted guidelines in 1977 and a summary of the guidelines below represents the 2005 updated version available on their website http://www.icmje.org/index.html. Apparently, over 500 journals have adopted the ICMJE guidelines (Klein, 1999; Stern, 2000) 5 For IEEE, authorship requires a “substantial intellectual contribution.” Each author must meet all of the following conditions: a. Made a significant intellectual contribution to the theoretical development, system or experimental design, prototype development, and/or the analysis and interpretation of data associated with the work contained in the manuscript; b. Contributed to drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for intellectual content; and 16 c. Approved the final version of the manuscript as accepted for publication, including references. - Revisions to Section 8.2.1.A - Authorship, of IEEE PSPB Operations Manual, Amended 23 June 2006, require the review and approval of the IEEE Board of Directors. http://www.ieee.org/portal/cms_docs_iportals/iportals/publications/PSPB/opsmanual.pdf 6 Chandra Sripada and Stephen Stich, "A Framework for the Psychology of Norms," to appear in P. Carruthers, S. Laurance and S. Stich, eds., Innateness and the Structure of the Mind, Vol. II. http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/Framework_for_the_Psychology_of_Nor ms_7-23-05.pdf 7 From Wesley E. Snyder, “Publication Ethics: A Common Sense Guide” http://www.ncsu.edu/IEEE-RAS/RAS/RASnews/041107PubEthicsGuide.htm This article was originally published in the June 2004 issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. © 2004 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. NOTE: These instructional materials are under development by the Model Curriculum for Land Grant Universities in Research Ethics (LANGURE) at www.chass.ncsu.edu/langure/ LANGURE is supported by the Research and Professional Ethics Program at North Carolina State University and the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0530217. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF) or NC State University. All materials used in these modules are used with permission or pursuant to the fair use provisions of Section 107 of Title 17, the United States Copyright law. Further uses may be subject to the copyright law. The materials under NC State University copyright may be used for non-profit educational purposes, if given the customary attribution and notification is sent to the project’s directors at gcomstock@ncsu.edu. Commercial use is prohibited.