How author lists can give more credit

Imagine how you’d feel if you worked hard on something, and then didn’t get any credit for it. Or worse, someone else gets the credit. Perhaps the lack of recognition only briefly annoys you. But what if it actually causes you to miss out on career opportunities? And when people look back in 50 years’ time, maybe they’ll think people like you didn’t exist – as though all your work occurred without any human intervention. You’ve been erased from history.

In science, getting credit in a research project is often a matter of making it on to the author list of the related publications. This list is supposed to represent all the people who made significant contributions to a study. Yet the history of science is haunted by the ghosts of unacknowledged individuals who helped to produce key scientific breakthroughs.

Arguably, a list of names at the top of an article doesn’t go far enough to recognise individual contributions.