Tonight in my ethics course, there was a case study offered in the area of authorship, and more specifically in the area of to whom authorship of a paper should be granted. The case involved a graduate student who had done the bulk of the work and the writing; her PI, who provided all things investigatory to the graduate student; an ancillary PI, possibly on the graduate student’s committee, who offered significant guidance in alternative experimental design and direction; a lab technician, who carried out some experiments but had no role in experimental design, data interpretation or analysis, or writing; and a final PI at another institution, who provided an antibody necessary for the experiment.
The question was: Who should be listed as authors on this paper?
Clearly, the former two players above should be listed as authors. The graduate student contributed the majority of the intellectual efforts to produce and report the data, and the main PI likely played a crucial role in directing the graduate student.
What is not so clear is whether any of the others should be listed as authors. For example, the lab technician contributed nothing intellectual to the project aside from her ability to transfer liquid from one container to another container ad nauseum. On the other hand, without her, the experiment could not have been completed.
Along the same lines, the third, antibody-producing PI was largely indispensable in the completion of the project, not for any intellectual contributions, but for provision of a crucial resource that would otherwise have taken a prohibitive amount of time and/or money to produce in-house.
Similarly, the ancillary, advice-offering PI provided much guidance necessary for the graduate student to have completed the project while not having contributed directly to its completion.
My feeling on this is that whether the technician and the ancillary PI are included or left off is a toss-up to me; I could go either way. According to the
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME), there are three basic requirements that an author should fulfill in order to be granted authorship:
- substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
and
- drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
and
- final approval of the version to be published.
Whether the technician and ancillary PI have met these requirements still seems a bit cloudy to me, as each clearly contributed substantially, although in different arenas, to the guidelines covered in #1 above. #2, however, is what would hold me back from granting them authorship in favor of acknowledgment elsewhere in the paper, which is typically bestowed upon individuals who deserve recognition for their contributions to the project at a sub-author level. Obviously, then, the third PI would fall squarely into this category.
There are cases that tend to get a bit dicier than this, though. One that often comes up is the use of resources as a bribe of sorts in exchange for authorship. For example, the third PI could just as easily have refused to provide the antibody unless she were guaranteed to be listed as an author, and while doing this would be considered extremely faux pas and would likely toe the oft-ambiguous line between “furthering one’s career” and “committing an act of scientific misconduct,” it’s not as though it’s never happened before. Indeed, this would put the graduate student and her PI in a sticky situation: They need the antibody, but would they be willing to contribute to authorship misconduct in order to get it?
The list goes on. Authorship issues can come up anytime, especially in the context of misbehavior or poor communication and planning among the various parties, and they certainly demand some interesting ethical considerations when the qualifications for one’s authorship are equivocal.
For any researchers reading this: How would you handle this case study? Who should be an author, and who should not?
