Many universities have official policies regarding authorship. The policies for the Harvard Medical School, Michigan State University and Washington University in St. Louis are typical and closely follow the guidelines adopted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Finally, Kathy Barker published this guide aimed at young scientists in Science Careers.
Most of the guidelines require that each author significantly contributed to conducting the science and drafted or revised the manuscript and approved the final version. The Journal of the American Medical Association requires all authors to fill out a checklist to certify that they qualify as an author.
Do you think it would be helpful for WHOI to have an official policy?
Posts
I am currently undecided about the value of WHOI having an official "policy" about authorship. Any such policy would need to acknowledge the distinct authorship conventions in different fields, reflecting the diversity of fields represented by WHOI scientists. However, I think that it is critical that students, postdocs, and others at WHOI are involved in discussions of authorship as part of their training and work. Towards that end, with your post, Mike, you have done a great service to the WHOI community. Authorship will be one of the topics that Mark Kurz and I will discuss in our Fall 2008 course "Science and Society".
ReplyDelete-Mark Hahn
I'm not sure whether there should be an official "policy," but guidelines and a description of the differences of conventions among fields would be helpful.
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