Question

When describing the order of authorship, many feel that it should be in descending order of how much they contributed to the study. The issue with this, however, is that this is a very subjective judgement. After all, how would you distinguish physical work that was performed from intellectual contributions made by a researcher? There are clearly some researchers who feel that the labor involved with research is important, while others feel that someone who performs no physical labor but contributed intellectually is providing more. If you were a researcher and just completed a study with two other researchers, one who did most of the physical work, while the other provided the knowledge required to plan and run the experiment, who do you think should receive more credit for their work and why?

Answer 1

I believe that each part of the study should be allotted a point system. This way, when the credit for the work needs to be given, we can go through each part of the study, from the initiation of the study to the final completion of it, and for every part of the study, the authorship should be awarded according to the points that are allotted. For instance, let us assume that the researcher who did most of the physical work is A, while the one who provided the knowledge base for running the experiment is B. Now, we allot points for every part of the process. It may be possible that the researcher A while putting in the physical work, did not actually do anything in the actual running of the experiment and formulation of the results. That means that A does not get any points in the department of knowledge and experiment process. On the other hand, while B provided the knowledge base, B also did some of the physical work for the experiment, not as much as A, but enough that B gets some amount of points in its account for the physical work. Finally, we calculate the total number of points A and B have, and the one with the most points gets the maximum credit.