Research assistants: Scientific credit and recognized authorship

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Key points

Research assistants are frequently excluded from authorship for several reasons—including the perception that they merely provide paid administrative help.
Authorship criteria should be based on the people who are both shapers and doers rather than the ICMJE recommendations which can be differently interpreted.
The pressure for single‐authored papers in some disciplines may lead to the exclusion of substantive contributors from authorship lists.
The CRediT taxonomy is a preferable means of recognizing and rewarding authors but may find resistance of those unwilling to disclose exact contributions.
Publishers can assist in recognizing all contributing authors by requiring affirmation that all who have significantly contributed are credited as authors.

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Most cited references 10

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Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit

Amy Brand, Liz Allen, Micah Altman … (2015)

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Is Open Access

Dynamics of co-authorship and productivity across different fields of scientific research

Austin J. Parish, Kevin W. Boyack, John P. A. Ioannidis (2018)

We aimed to assess which factors correlate with collaborative behavior and whether such behavior associates with scientific impact (citations and becoming a principal investigator). We used the R index which is defined for each author as log(Np)/log(I1), where I1 is the number of co-authors who appear in at least I1 papers written by that author and Np are his/her total papers. Higher R means lower collaborative behavior, i.e. not working much with others, or not collaborating repeatedly with the same co-authors. Across 249,054 researchers who had published ≥30 papers in 2000–2015 but had not published anything before 2000, R varied across scientific fields. Lower values of R (more collaboration) were seen in physics, medicine, infectious disease and brain sciences and higher values of R were seen for social science, computer science and engineering. Among the 9,314 most productive researchers already reaching Np ≥ 30 and I1 ≥ 4 by the end of 2006, R mostly remained stable for most fields from 2006 to 2015 with small increases seen in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Both US-based authorship and male gender were associated with higher values of R (lower collaboration), although the effect was small. Lower values of R (more collaboration) were associated with higher citation impact (h-index), and the effect was stronger in certain fields (physics, medicine, engineering, health sciences) than in others (brain sciences, computer science, infectious disease, chemistry). Finally, for a subset of 400 U.S. researchers in medicine, infectious disease and brain sciences, higher R (lower collaboration) was associated with a higher chance of being a principal investigator by 2016. Our analysis maps the patterns and evolution of collaborative behavior across scientific disciplines.