What level of work merits authorship on an academic paper?

The four times I was put as an author, the placement of my name (first, second, 7th, etc.) reflected the amount of work that I put in – and I believed it was well deserved, I put in a lot of time and effort.

It’s a tough subject… Usually it’s both an intellectual property thing, and a who-did-the-most-work thing, generally scaled as seen appropriate by the PI.

Also, what is an RA? Where I go to school, undergrads can totally be authors on papers, providing they did a lot of data collection or writing.

Unfortunately, a lot of it can be political, and reflect your relationship with the lead author.

My experience of this from the science side is from my son. It seems that the advisor or professor who is directing the research is the one who determines authorship and order.

From what I can tell, it depends heavily on a number of things. This is what I’ve noticed:

~If you are an undergrad, your being an author at all depends heavily on your Principal Investigator and whether or not he/she thinks you deserve to be on it. There are some who just don’t think undergrads belong on papers and some who will put you on depending on work level. In the end, it depends on PI. I guess you could argue with them but, still.
~In graduate school, seems to depend on your work input and then PI. The PI will usually resolve it if there’s a problem or disagreement. People who do the intellectual work tend to be put on and then their placement in the author order shows how much work they did. If you only did the experiments, it’s at your PI’s discretion, again.
~Past graduate school, kind of looks more like you’ll get your name on either way but odds are good you’re doing more work for the experiment at that point.

I got put on a paper as an undergrad for doing all of the actual experiments but that was a rarity when discussing it with my friends.

Also in terms of that “hey did you think of…” situation, a lot of people use the Acknowledgments section for that kind of thing. There’s a big difference between “you should look into this and here’s how you can do it” (from the advisor/PI = probably authorship) and “gee, i wonder if this would be a good idea…” (from your parents or best friend = acknowledgments).

I would think it has to do with research design and data analysis. Anyone can do data collection with proper training. Data collectors are supposed to be machines, doing exactly the same thing every time they collect a new case.

Of course the principal investigator goes first. Even if the PI has done very little work other than to advise or consult with the other researchers. Usually it’s an analysis that is based on the work that made the PI famous.

As to the others—well, if they contributed more than say 15% of the intellectual content of the study, I’d say they get authorship. Any less doesn’t make the grade.

Having said that, my shop has sometimes been named as author(s), even though we only did a little consulting about research design or data collection methods or data analysis. Hell, they even put my name on once, and I hadn’t done anything other than train the grad student who did the work. But I don’t think we should be on the list because we’re paid consultants. It’s our job to help others. We don’t do it for the glory of discovery.

In my personal experience, an editor who changes one line and adds one small piece of information to a 20-page paper (plus gets the abbreviation of Arizona wrong) gets to be co-author. He was an important scientist in my field, but not much of a decent human being.

Actually, in a perfect world everyone who worked on the project should be a co-author, ranked by how much work they put into it, with the person who runs the lab and gets the funding and whose idea it was as the lead author. But it rarely happens that way.

An example, Guillain–Barré Syndrome was actually originally written up by Jean Landry in 1859. Then in 1916, Georges Guillain, Jean Alexandre Barré, and André Strohl diagnosed two soldiers with the illness and discovered the key diagnostic abnormality of increased spinal fluid protein production. If science were fair, this should be called Landry–Guillain–Barré–Strohl Syndrome, but Guillain refused to have it. I don’t know why he let Barré‘s name stay on it. Perhaps Barré knew too many of Guillain’s secrets.

And don’t get me started on who should really have won certain Nobel prizes, instead of who actually was given the honor.

Scientists are people, and sometimes not very nice people. When it comes to working for a university, all’s fair in love and achieving tenure.

Depending on the project, some research assistants are fortunate enough to be given credit on academic papers. A friend of mine was a research assistant on a chemical engineering project and he was delighted to be listed as an author. At the time, he was an undergraduate.

I think it all depends on the situation.

My experience is that this is very field dependent, and that people have very different ideas on what is fair.

My personal stance tends to be that anyone who did actual data collection or experiments or wrote several actual sentences to the manuscript gets credited. In addition, people who came up with the key idea of the paper will of course be credited too. I do not think this should be dependent on position (RA, team leader) or academic rank (student, doctor, professor), but on actual work involved.

After that it gets messier. Say someone not otherwise involved reads an early draft and spots a major mistake that completely turns the direction of the project—I would count them as “involved”, and hence an author, but that does not mean everyone who commented is an author…

In the end, the whole problem boils down to “points scoring” with publications being valued too highly. If we did not need to compete on such an artificial measurement, it would be less important.

The “who gets the real credit later” that @Darwin describes is still a separate and messier issue.

Anyone who wrote a substantial part of any major section of the paper must get authorship credit. Anyone without whom the study could not have been completed should get authorship credit (e.g. the person who did the entire literature review or who developed the unique methodology for data collection or analysis)
(Anyone grad student sleeping with the PI)

@fireinthepriory: RAs are Research Assistants. I get the sense undergrad authorship varies a lot depending on the PI. The PIs (or grad students) who want to mentor undergrads and turn them into good scientists might help them get on a paper… but I think most of them just want free labor.

There is a lot of contention of what is ethical authorship in academia, especially since “publish or perish” motivates people to include authors that did not actually contribute in a meaningful way.
Here’s a little something from the NIH
I think it’s pretty clear that absentee landlords of department heads and undergrads who collect surveys are not eligible for authorship by this reference, but trying to get that sort of thing to fly in modern academics is probably next to impossible.