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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

What if you’re the guy who is keeping the lab running, ie the guy who is securing the funding?

Simply securing funding and being a manager does not qualify for authorship (based on the read on multiple journals submission policy). I don't think this is universally observed or even really policed, so it's fairly common to see people who really did not contribute anything (even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback) listed as the last/corresponding author.

Which should be treated as misconduct.

Folks who do this should be shunned by their peers and driven out of academia. It's exploitative and coercive.

Unfortunately people like that tend to run academia.

Not as exploitative as the anonymous reviewer report that asked to add 15 additional papers to our lit review ... all by the same author.

I’ve had that happen in notes from an editor telling me that in addition to addressing reviewer comments I should cite a whole bunch of their completely unrelated articles when submitting a revision.

But I have also been a reviewer in a situation where a supposed broad review article for a preeminent journal completely ignores citing a massive amount of relevant prior work (except, conveniently, the authors’ own work, which in many cases was cited over more relevant and important earlier work), including a large number of my own articles.

I doubt it's any comfort but there are so many people who find this story and many like it to be disgraceful. The unfortunate thing is that they clearly aren't the people who run journals or conference committees.

ICMJE guidelines are frequently cited by other publishers, with the caveat that it depends based on the field. (Which makes sense. A "substantial contribution" to the LIGO collaboration might be much less direct than one in ML or field geology.)

> Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

> Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND

> Final approval of the version to be published; AND

> Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

So you are right. The corresponding author who got funding for the postdoc who designed the experiment for the graduate student that supervised undergradutes and wrote the paper would have a pretty tenuous commection to authorship.

But good luck to everyone else in that chain publishing without them.

Ref: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-respo...

> even sitting in on a weekly progress report and giving feedback

Depending on the specific nature of the feedback, someone who does something describable as this could be providing anywhere from 0 to 99% of the scientific insight provided by the paper.

Yes. For one of my hosted interns, I was invited to the weekly meeting (the intern was "working for" another team) and asked for insight, before being added to the paper. I had expected to be listed simply for being the intern host but they didn't agree. I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, I think if a PI runs a lab, brings in all the funding for a grad student, and doesn't really get deeply involved, they should still be listed because they provided the environment in which the research could be done, but I've been told this is a controversial opinion.

I'm not sure I understand what it means to be the "intern host" in this context or why that matters for authorship, if the intern was working for another team, and that team was the one working on the paper.

Regardless, if you showed up to a weekly meeting, and provided insight into the data provided, then it does sound like you deserve authorship.

An intern host: I worked in bigtech. i got permission to secure a summer intern (paid by my cost center). I wrote a job description, interviewed candidates, and hired the best one. the intern came to the company, I found a desk for them, I met with them weekly for status reports, and daily to chat about various stuff. In this case, due to my role and its demands, I could not spend time working on interesting research, so instead, I arranged for the intern to work daily with another team that was doing relevant research. I was invited to, and attended, periodic status meetings, occasionally contributing what little knowledge I had (but absolutely no coding or ML engineering). I read the final paper (did not write any of it) and approved and I received authorship credit (as did the intern's PhD advisor, who also did not really contribute much technical stuff, but provided lab space, and a stimulating environment in which to work and learn).

I would have been OK with a simple credit in the paper (an acknowledgement) but after the fact I realized I had been invited to meetings specifically to justify my co-authorship.

Gotcha.

I would agree that you were invited specifically to justify giving you co-authorship. As evidenced by the existence of our conversation right now, exactly what level of involvement justifies co-authorship is fuzzy at the margins; whatever their personal views, they were probably doing you a favor by moving your involvement from the fuzzy zone into the hard-to-argue-with zone. Even if everyone directly involved in the paper thinks "being an intern host justifies authorship" the presence of some senior institutional figure who disagrees could cause problems for you.

Surely the dean and the provost deserve to be listed then too?

In general the last author (in CS) is the one managing. I'm sure many a PhD student can tell you that their advisors, who are on every paper they write, have at times provided little to no input (potentially providing negative value, at least with respect to the research topic at hand).

Securing the funding often means writing a research plan that is interesting and convincing enough to be selected for funding in a competitive review process (80–97% rejection rate). The plan usually represents a substantial intellectual contribution that serves as the foundation for derived papers. As long as the people who join the project later don't freeze the planner out of the paper writing process, they'll usually meet all authorship criteria.

I've had a professor who complained he hadn't been made co-author of a paper I wrote, despite the fact that he had not even bothered to read it despite me asking multiple times for his feedback.

I asked him to read it and at least give me _some_ feedback before I submitted an extended version of the paper to a journal. I never did. His name never materialized as co-author.

sounds fair, fuck that guy

Doesn't sound like you're doing any actual science there. What about the guy feeding the scientists or housing them, what about the government for providing roads and sewage? That's like putting Steve Jobs' name on all the patents that Apple produced.

Did they? (Put his name in all of Apples patents?)

Steve Jobs has 1114 patents. Apple has 16240.

so yes.

I've worked at at least one company where the managers would routinely name themselves as "inventors" on patent applications, where their subordinates were the ones actually doing the "inventing."

I've worked at one, too.

That felt... disheartening.

But also the best motivator to stop selling your brain to heartless corps and go build your own stuff

The true incubators are the ones that you where inside all too long

Building my own stuff: definitely.

Doing all the admin work, all the capital raising, etc. needed to build my own stuff: I suspect that this would kill me.

Joining a nice startup: been there, done that... will do it again :)

"Securing the funding" is much closer to the work than "providing roads and sewage".

In most sciences, to actually secure the funding, you need to argue for why the problem is important, why the team has a shot at solving it, and what possible approaches look promising. Then you need to actually advise the team in supporting the work.

If that's all you do then your work is very valuable, but you have no business being a coauthor on any of the papers. The dean of the university also secures funding for the university, hopefully you can see that that doesn't make them a coauthor.

Thank them in the acknowledgements.

You might as well give Donald Trump coauthorship, then. Actually this could be an excellent idea: if enough scientists kiss his behind in this way Trump might change his mind about supporting large cuts to science funding.

Trump has that "you want to be the last person to leave the room" type though, as that's as much as he cares to remember if even.

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