‘ECR Asks’ is a series of Q&A sessions where I speak with experienced SORTEE members to explore their journey in, and perspectives on, open science and transparent research. With the goal of supporting early career researchers like myself, this series aims to answer big questions and share practical insights on navigating the ever evolving landscape of open science and academia.

Q&A

Before beginning my PhD, I thought I had a clear understanding of how academic authorship worked: if you contributed to a project, your name went on the paper, and your position in the author list reflected the extent of your contribution — with the PI serving as the anchor at the end. As I’ve progressed through my academic career, however, I’ve realised that the simple guidelines don’t always fit the messy realities of real-world research projects. Instead, authorship often seems to be shaped by “unspoken rules” and highly situational informal norms that can require the guidance of a mentor to understand.

This month, I spoke with Professor Steven Cooke, Professor in the Institute of Environmental and Interdisciplinary Sciences and Department of Biology at Carleton University, Canada, as well as the Director of the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Informed Conservation. While Steven’s research primarily focuses on aquatic ecology and conservation biology, he has also written across the social elements of research, including tips for fostering interdisciplinary research and the importance of recognising diverse conservation contributions. Steve joined me on September 30th, offering an experienced authors’ insight into the thought processes behind authorship.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Authorship Basics

ECR: What kind of paper contribution warrants authorship as opposed to an acknowledgement?

SC: Authorship shouldn’t be handed out like candy and there needs to be some way to ensure it doesn’t become meaningless. There’s two parts to it. There’s the contribution side that we are most familiar with (i.e., did someone make a meaningful contribution to the work?), but there’s also the ownership side: Is somebody willing to acknowledge that they are part of that paper, that they’re responsible for the paper and its content? There are some people that make contributions, but at the same time don’t understand the whole, and aren’t in a position to be able to take on that role of responsibility, or feel uncomfortable doing so, in which case, their contribution would be more appropriate for an acknowledgement.

If you do multidisciplinary work, you might not understand all the details of every paper you’re a part of, but at the same time, one of the benefits of doing interdisciplinary work is the opportunity to work across boundaries and learn from each other. So, if I’m on a paper, at the very least, I should understand the principles or fundamentals of the topic.

ECR: As research becomes increasingly collaborative and cross-disciplinary, the number of authors on papers seems to be increasing. Is there an optimal number of authors for a paper, and is it a ‘bad look’ to have few-author papers, particularly during your thesis?

SC: Labs differ on whether they have an inclusive or exclusive approach to authorship. In some labs, it’s very inclusive, with a lot of cross-cutting collaboration and space for people to earn authorship in a variety of different ways. Other labs are most frequently producing work that has just the grad student and supervisors. Not every paper needs a cast of thousands and it’s entirely acceptable to have papers that are single author, two-author, three-author, if that’s who did the work.

There are a lot of different philosophies out there when it comes to collaboration. Collaborative research takes work. It’s not just, “oh, the 10 of us are going to do this, so we’ll just split the pie into 10 equal pieces”. It’s usually much more complicated and involves a lot of compromise and teamwork. When there’s multiple authors on a paper, it’s not any one person’s paper, it’s everyone’s paper: there might be elements of it that you would have done differently. Some people can’t handle that. Some really impressive scientists might be control freaks who just don’t like to collaborate, and that’s okay. In my lab, I set the culture of “the more the merrier” though. Most of my papers, especially ones I lead these days, have a cast of thousands. My biggest that I’ve led is 57, which included a dance choreographer and a neurosurgeon as co-authors (to show you the breadth of expertise that one sometimes gets to work with).

ECR: It seems like authorship is used as a type of currency, or at least a carrot, in academia, with many willing to work for free in exchange for authorship, whereas others just do their jobs as a paid position without interest in authorship. Is this generally considered a reasonable exchange?

SC: Graphic designers are the example we use in our lab. Sometimes there’s space for the designer to make an intellectual contribution in visualising our ideas that would lead to authorship, which they take even when we don’t have funding to pay them, whereas others have no interest in authorship and are trying to pay the bills. Just because a person’s paid also doesn’t mean that they can’t earn authorship. We should all be fairly compensated for the work we do. For example, while the default is not to give paid summer students authorship just because they help on a study (i.e., if they’re a worker bee, and their job is to just show up and do X, and that’s where the engagement ends, then that’s not enough to warrant authorship) but if they get involved and engage and contribute meaningfully intellectually to a paper, they can become an author.

ECR: The idea behind specific contribution statements such as CREDIT and MeRIT is to fairly and transparently credit everyone for exactly how they contributed to each paper. I’ve heard however that the overall authorship order still carries the most weight in evaluations and career advancement. From your perspective, are transparent contribution statements being taken into account?

SC: I’ve been a part of a lot of selection panels and, to be blunt, we’re not downloading the paper to read the credit statement. Perhaps if there was a large multi-author paper in Science or Nature (or other “glam” journal), that might be justification to dig in and see their specific contributions, but, in general, we don’t have the time. In that case, authorship order will matter most. At some point in a career, authorship order stops mattering, but I do acknowledge it is a lot more important for early career folks. In short, the first author is the name that people will remember.

While it’s great to be working towards fairer crediting systems, these conversations can’t stop science. I’ve seen efforts, especially on the front end, to really try and establish authorship guidelines, but these rigid guidelines have stymied creativity, and, in many ways, killed a paper. With authorship there’s too much nuance to be easily captured in any simple crediting approach. It’s often easier to just keep the conversation between all collaborators open.

Non-Academic Authors and Diverse Contributions

ECR: Big projects, particularly in ecology, often depend heavily on non-academic contributions such as from landowners, administrators, indigenous experts, and field staff. As you established in your 2021 perspectives paper, ‘Contemporary authorship guidelines fail to recognize diverse contributions in conservation science research’, these contributions deserve to be recognised. Would you be able to give a brief outline of the idea behind this paper?

SC: The genesis of that perspective paper was the idea that there were key people that, in my mind, had earned authorship but, when we included them as authors, received pushback from sceptical journal editors. As we dug further in, we realised that, at least in the conservation space, these key people are often forgotten about. Whether these contributions will be recognised as acknowledgements or authorship in each specific case will come down to a conversation and whether the individual wants to engage or not, but first we need to create that space for people to engage.

We know that work that’s done collaboratively and that’s co-produced with other parties — such as an indigenous community, parliamentary government, or wildlife managers — is more likely to be used by those parties. If you’ve done co-production properly, it’s really obvious as to who the authors are. These groups would have helped to identify the questions, frame and interpret the study, and may have even helped with the funding, and so they’ve clearly earned authorship with those things. Something like a landowner simply granting access to land wouldn’t suffice for authorship but if that landowner accompanied you to the spring that’s in the back corner of their property, told you things about it ecologically that they’d observed over their lifetime, or that had been passed down through generations, and actively engage in the ongoing study and results, that would be a different story.

Messy Case Studies

ECR: In a situation where a researcher has originally begun a project, but others have later completed the analysis or writing, how should authorship be fairly assigned? So, for example, if somebody spent several years starting up a new field site from which ultimately multiple papers were generated, even after that original researcher has moved on and started working in another space, should they be receiving authorship on all resultant papers from that field site or project?

SC: That’s an interesting case that requires a conversation with that individual person. This situation can sometimes arise with your own thesis work. You finish, get a job, and all of a sudden publications don’t matter anymore and maybe you don’t have the time to engage with it anymore. I often have to bring in what I call “finishers” — somebody to take the manuscript from the thesis version and put it in a peer-reviewed journal. In those instances, we almost always try to retain the grad student as first author, but at some point, there’s a line that’s crossed where all the analyses had to be redone and the paper was rewritten, where it doesn’t really look like what it was before. That might be an example of where shared first authorship is the best outcome because the grad student wouldn’t have gotten the research published without the finisher, but there would be nothing for the finisher to finish without the grad student… My experience has been, by and large, that if a researcher doesn’t have the wherewithal to get a paper out the door and publish it, they’re willing to make a compromise.

However, if they’re not willing, or they become literally unreachable, and we still want to publish, we may choose to proceed without them. After a period of time (which would probably be in the order of several years) I would involve my Associate Dean of research. There’s a risk to me if I try to publish it without the original author’s consent; the original author could make a complaint against me professionally, or go to the journal and try to have it retracted. I would want to have a record of trying to contact the author as well as a record of engagement with the University to provide legal protection if need be.

ECR: A common complaint I’ve experienced with PhD students is the feeling that they have done sufficient work to be warranted first author, but have already agreed to be second author.  What are the actual protocols here? Is it up to the person who was meant to be second author to manage their own work, and not cross their own boundaries to do too much work, or is it up to the first author to manage how much the second author does?

SC: I think it has to be a collaborative conversation. You can have those conversations on the front end, but the problem is that things evolve over time. So we can create a plan to which everyone agrees, but when push comes to shove, things come up, and the team has to be willing to revisit the plan. I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a paper where I’ve said, “I’m not going to do more because I’m going to get into first author territory, and I don’t think I’m going to be first author”. If a paper needs work, you’re gonna put in the work that’s needed. At the same time, I don’t think it goes unnoticed if the first author is really shirking their responsibilities and not stepping up. My experience has been, when that happens, the person that’s the first author is not oblivious to it, and they’re often at the point where they’re just happy that somebody else is moving it along.

It can be really helpful in these situations to have a mentor to help guide those conversations to a reasonable spot, even if it’s not somebody on the paper. Say it was a paper with three or four grad students, a third-party mentor could serve that guidance role, to help you navigate that as a group. The best way forward is just keeping the conversation open and transparent the whole time.