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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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...

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