Authorship position should not serve as a proxy metric (original) (raw)

By

  1. Daniel Hornburg
    1. Stanford University, California, USA.

Marcus Munafò and George Davey Smith suggest that using different lines of evidence (triangulation) to verify results will change how credit is assigned to authors of research papers (Nature 553, 399–401; 2018). In my view, it would help if we were to abolish the convention of using an author’s position in the list as a proxy weighting of contribution. Such a move would shift the assessor’s curiosity to the ‘author contributions’ section, and render evaluation more meaningful and transparent.

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Nature 554, 423 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02204-w

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