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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

It's also in the links in that repo, but may be more interesting to some folks here:

Katie's paper on VLBI reconstruction: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413

This is how I learned about the topic and I think it's well suited for computery folks, since it was published in CVPR.

There are 6 authors for that paper, the way you linked it suggested it's solely by her; are the other authors listed honorarily?

Similarly the title suggests she worked alone on the project. Which seems exceedingly unlikely given the need for telescope time and computing time and the wide range of disciplines I imagine the project covers ... did she work alone. That must be almost unique in experimentalism nowadays?

It depends a bit on the scientific field, but in mine (computer vision, which this was also published in) the first author is the "main" author, usually doing most if not all the "ground work", then you have collaborators and co-authors, and finally the supervisors (in the case of the PhD student that she was at the time). It is becoming more common to see papers with "Author1, Author2, Author3..." lists, where the "*" authors count with equal contribution. This is important for attribution and the infamous metrics that funding often depends on, but it's not the case here.

So I'm certain those authors did their part, so maybe yes, I should have linked this as "Bouman et al." but I wouldn't expect this to be six equal contributions either.

That all being said, she's certainly standing on the shoulders of a pyramid of giants there.

Edit: to the people downvoting the parent, maybe explain? I didn't take this as a bad faith comment. It can be genuinely confusing to someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of academic attribution...

I'd argue that in practice science is more of a pile of giants.

Giant turtles. Its giant turtles all the way down.

I've found that CS contributions in academia are often poorly credited (sometimes even entirely neglected) to endeavors not purely executed within CS itself.

It's interesting considering how many modern scientific endeavors are dependent on new innovative algorithms, software, and computing techniques in both experimental and theoretical work then its frequently just hand-waved away as "technology."

I'm not saying such contributions (typically, though they can,) lay groundwork for an experiment or theory in another domain, but I am saying active CS involvement/expertise is typically critical to many scientific endeavors' success these days. If a project is interdiscipinary, there's probably a computer scientist on the team helping out.

Although I agree with the point you have raised, it can sometimes be a little tricky to draw the line. Should we have Microsoft cited for projects completed using their software or system? Should we always cite Newton when using calculus?

I think society implicitly assumes that there has been a tone of people backing up a single individual towards their main achievements and that the individual is humble enough to know and to try - ever so slightly - to show appreciation.

That's why I said "actively."

From my perspective, if in order to accomplish your work, you need consult or active collaboration with a computer scientist and otherwise could not develop/test your theory or conduct your experiment, then they almost certainly should be cited as an author/collaborator.

If you utilize something OTS outside the project that just works for you and don't need a computer scientist, then whatever entity created that OTS IP isn't really an author/collaborator, but it's likely their work should be cited/referenced if it's part of the critical methodology (as part of disclosure and repeatability).

If your project used Microsoft Word to write up a report, it's not important to the underlying science you conducted. You could have substituted it with TeX, other Word processors, or pen/paper and it wouldn't change the outcome of the underlying theory/experiment you developed. If you used an Ansys package to perform analysis for some purpose, you should probably mention that out of rigor but Ansys isn't an author or collaborator.

If on the other hand you need someone to architect a solution to handle processing your massive dataset, needed someone to write custom code because nothing could do what you needed, needed a new algorithm because you had no clue how to approach the problem, or even needed someone to modify source code significantly to something that existed but couldn't do what you needed, then they are certainly an author/collaborator. If you took existing code/algorithm and made it more efficient in order to accomplish a task that would have taken too long otherwise, you're a contributor/collaborator and should be listed as an author.

This has been a huge issue in academic research but it's been getting a bit better and researchers are starting even more to acknowledge/credit computing professionals as crucial contributors and authors, as they rightfully should be.

> That's why I said "actively."

That's one of the reasons I said "I agree with the point you have raised".

I also think you have once again, raised some good points. Hopefully, others will use similar structures when writing and publishing their research.

Not just CS, but depending on the discipline, math and statistics more generally.

I’ve gotten authorship when I have collaborated on the paper itself (rather than just research: that’s how you get into acknowledgements, same as lab techs, collaborators who didn’t work on this specific paper, etc.)

In this case she is a Computer Scientist, so the CS contributions are the first author on the paper.

Papers are routinely credited to their first author. Everyone understand the co-authors also took part. She also clearly credits the rest of the team in the posted BBC article.

She does clearly credit the rest of the team, which is admirable as she's also clearly been key to this piece of work.

Somehow though my facebook feed is already littered with images saying she was single-handedly responsible and no one's talking about her.

https://bit.ly/2Gkfk7f

Very few science papers have a single author these days. She's listed as first author, so presumably her contribution was at least as important as anyone else's.

If we want to be pedantic, this paper is the work of millions of humans throughout history, who have helped developed the math knowledge for such a project to even be feasible.

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