Authorship! Authorship!-Reply

Abstract

In Reply —We thank Drs Green and Kasper for their comments. Green writes that we tended to skirt the problems presented when promotion is awarded on the basis of number rather than quality of publications and when honorary authorship may be awarded in return for favors. In fact, we thought we addressed these problems directly, noting, in the title and elsewhere, that publications are the coins used to assess academic worth and bemoaning the lack of standards to assess the value of the coinage and the impossibility of judging anyone's merit by counting the number of their papers. We also cited a few of the many articles that have been written on this subject, some of them making the same points as those made by Green, for example, listing the authors' relative contributions. As we suggested, the academic tenure and promotion committee is, for the academic, where the rubber meets