Authorship order
matthewturk opened this issue · 8 comments
I've been giving a fair bit of thought to the order of authorship on the paper. I personally reject the premise that authorship requires contribution of text, but, the there may be some validity in ordering the authors based on textual contributions.
I would really like to be the first author after "The yt project" but I'm not sure I can ethically justify special-casing for that. But, if I could, what I am leaning toward is a two-tier system. Those authors who have contributed text to the paper (including whose text has been committed to the repository by me, like @langmm ) would be in Tier One, and they would be in the first set of authors. The second set of authors would be those who are authors on the paper, but have not contributed substantial text to the paper.
My proposal would be to explore either randomizing or alphabetizing the second tier of authors, and potentially ordering the first by "amount of effort toward this specific paper." The issue I run into there is that I'm not sure we can really quantify or order in that tier. (It would, though, probably result in me getting my position toward the top.)
I'll include a link to this issue when I email to the co-author list, and solicit ideas and feedback.
The proposal in the 3rd paragraph sounds good to me, and indeed, I am +1 on Matt Turk being the author after "The yt project" -- Matt, you've done the vast majority of the writing and pushing this through.
+1 on the proposal in 3rd paragraph and on Matt Turk being first after the project.
For how to assess the first tier "amount of effort toward this specific paper" -- one thing that I've seen other large research groups do when publishing is to create a rubric and form and ask folks to self report their effort. This might be something like a set of questions along the lines of:
(1 point): Did you write a section of the paper?
(1 point): Did you contribute a figure or code to the direct support of this paper (e.g., performance testing that is included in the paper)?
(1 point): Did you ... ?
Then have folks answer the form, tally the numbers and sort by total score. I'm sure that any rubric used would put Matt first... it does of course introduce the question of how to set the rubric, but having community sign off on the questions that would be included would be more transparent than trying to gauge individual effort of others.
Without a doubt in my mind, I think Matt should be first author for combined leadership of the paper and the project.
I am quite a bit less comfortable with the two-tier author system. If the paper is to stand for the project, then I am against what this says about contribution valuing. Is a small contribution to the paper worth more than a large contribution to the project? What about those with large contributions to yt-4 who departed the project prior to the paper?
I think the size and diversity of contribution to this project makes the exercise of ranking contribution nearly undoable. I don't like random either because it is either ambiguous or implies some sort of lottery, which itself attributes value to placement in the list. I am wary of the point system described above. There are lots of biases involved in a system of self-reporting contributions. Who will put themselves forward? Who will hesitate to consider something a contribution? My personal preference would be Matt then alphabetical. It makes a clear statement.
I hope this doesn't sound like I am upset. I have strong feelings, which is different. I also don't want my point of view to rule the conversation and I am happy to be outvoted.
all good points, @brittonsmith !
I was initially attracted to the tiers because as a more recent member of the yt community who only started contributing after the initial yt 4.0 push and hasn't contributed text to the 4.0 paper I didn't feel like I warranted the same level of attribution on this paper as others. But a Matt + alphabetical list is fine by me if those that have contributed more are OK with that.
Totally fair, @chrishavlin! For what it's worth, I think you have made some fairly significant contributions and seem likely to continue to do so for some time. This paper will very likely be thee yt citation for many years, and so one could argue it would be unfair to penalize you for your relative newness.
I'm in general agreement with 1st author Matt, alphabetical afterwards. I think it's unequivocal that Matt has been the lead of the project since the start, but sorting the dozens of other contributors/authors will be a very difficult, potentially messy process.