What is co-authorship?

Co-authorship is the key to accessing to a future permanent academic position. When you write your own papers, things are simple, you can put yourself as first author. And then you may be encouraged to put some of your colleagues and of your lab hierarchy in the co-author list. Depending on the community, you may have to put at the end the one who drove the research, or the one who funded it. But sometimes, things are really getting difficult to understand. In particular when you don't write the article by yourself. Worst case is a research where you have contributed orally, but where your contribution was "forgotten" in the discussion, and simply attributed to someone else.

These rules for establishing co-authorship, despite official statements by some dedicated organisms do exist, remain rather implicit in research groups, and then, shapable. They are used to change from one group to another, from one lab to another.

How many times I contributed somehow without being co-author. "I was not supposed to work on this topic", hence contribution is usually considered as gifts. Embarrassing.

So how to make a contribution recognized?

• Contributing visually... A contribution can be a purely materialistic contribution, means a figure, a table, some text added inside the publication. Then, things are rather clear. If you visually contributed to a paper, hence a consensus honors that you deserve co-authorship.
• Write projects... How to become a contributor if you brought an important idea for the study? Then, two cases appear: either you are at the origin of the funding, then the group all accept that you deserve the last author position. But if you did communicate the idea to the co-workers, then, you may rather see the idea taken, and your name disappearing from any publication made by your own colleagues. Why ? Know knows? I got to the conclusion that ideas have no owner in research. They may have in industry world, but in research, the first to publish on a topic got the idea, which is basically a wrong concept, but practically a temporarily pseudo-good solution. With a bit of mathematics, we may understand that it makes justice only for round about 10% of project leaders. Means maybe 1% of the academic world.
• What about this great advise I gave, which accelerated the research ? No answer so far, then stays in the gift box.

Are there universal / good practice rules?

YES! First, both you and me have to read the references of this ticket! A lot has been done in this topic, which is good news. [To be developed atter reading them].

• Short practical receipes: http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2006/01/cover-credit.aspx

References

- http://retractionwatch.com/2013/03/27/who-deserves-to-be-an-author-on-a-scientific-paper/#comment-10952

- http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/attribution_workshop

- https://figshare.com/articles/Report_on_the_International_Workshop_on_Contributorship_and_Scholarly_Attribution,_May_16,_2012/96831

- https://www.researchtrends.com/issue-31-november-2012/fixing-authorship-towards-a-practical-model-of-contributorship/

- http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2008/10/when-does-alice-deserve-to-be-co-author.html

- http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2013/lt02/lt_2013_02_40_40.pdf

- http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2006/01/cover-credit.aspx

- http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7417-591a