Attribution Of Credit Research Articles

Authorship and Publication Practices in the Social Sciences: Historical Reflections on Current Practices

An historical review of authorship definitions and publication practices that are embedded in directions to authors and in the codes of ethics in the fields of psychology, sociology, and education illuminates reasonable agreement and consistency across the fields with regard to (a) originality of the work submitted, (b) data sharing, (c) human participants' protection, and (d) conflict of interest disclosure. However, the role of the professional association in addressing violations of research or publication practices varies among these fields. Psychology and sociology provide active oversight with sanction authority. In education, the association assumes a more limited role: to develop and communicate standards to evoke voluntary compliance. With respect to authorship credit, each association's standards focus on criteria for inclusion as an author, other than on the author's ability to defend and willingness to take responsibility for the entire work. Discussions across a broad range of research disciplines beyond the social sciences would likely be beneficial. Whether improved standards will reduce either misattribution or perceptions of inappropriate attribution of credit within social science disciplines will likely depend on how well authorship issues are addressed in responsible conduct of research education (RCR), in research practice, and in each association's ongoing efforts to influence normative practice by specifying and clarifying best practices.

The Experimenter's Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine

Today, the production of knowledge in the experimental life sciences relies crucially on the use of biological data collections, such as DNA sequence databases. These collections, in both their creation and their current use, are embedded in the experimentalist tradition. At the same time, however, they exemplify the natural historical tradition, based on collecting and comparing natural facts. This essay focuses on the issues attending the establishment in 1982 of GenBank, the largest and most frequently accessed collection of experimental knowledge in the world. The debates leading to its creation-about the collection and distribution of data, the attribution of credit and authorship, and the proprietary nature of knowledge-illuminate the different moral economies at work in the life sciences in the late twentieth century. They offer perspective on the recent rise of public access publishing and data sharing in science. More broadly, this essay challenges the big picture according to which the rise of experimentalism led to the decline of natural history in the twentieth century. It argues that both traditions have been articulated into a new way of producing knowledge that has become a key practice in science at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Aptly named Aharonov-Bohm effect has classical analogue, long history

Writing about what is usually termed the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect, Peter Sturrock and Timothy Groves argue (Physics Today, April 2010, page 8) that the same physics was discovered a decade earlier 1 1. W. Ehrenberg, R. E. Siday, Proc. Phys. Soc. B 62, 8 (1949). and should rightly be called the Ehrenberg-Siday effect. I agree that Werner Ehrenberg and Raymond Siday deserve recognition for their anticipation of AB. Indeed, in recent talks celebrating the 50th anniversary of AB, I began by describing the unfairly neglected paper by Ehrenberg and Siday. Nevertheless, I have come to a different conclusion from Sturrock and Groves: The expression “Aharonov-Bohm effect” is justified, for two reasons.First, although there is no doubt that the work by Ehrenberg and Siday anticipated how inaccessible magnetic flux can influence electron interference, that was as a curiosity, at the end of a paper whose main emphasis was the Hamiltonian analysis of electron optics. By contrast, Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm emphasized from the start, as an essential and general aspect of quantum mechanics, the physical influence of inaccessible fields that act nonlocally through the vector potential.Second, Ehrenberg and Siday’s semi-classical approximation—essentially applying the Dirac magnetic phase factor to electrons traveling on either side of the flux—implies a wavefunction that is multivalued and therefore not the correct solution of Schrödinger’s equation. The lack of a single-valued wavefunction leaves their prediction open to doubt. By contrast, Aharonov and Bohm derived the exact single-valued solution for waves scattered by a flux line. Recently, it was shown that the Ehrenberg-Siday approximation corresponds to the first terms in a “many-whirls” representation that treats the exact AB wavefunction as a topological sum over paths circling the flux. 2 2. M. V. Berry, J. Phys. A (in press). Attribution of credit is a delicate matter. It tends to excite strong feelings, and I write about it reluctantly. But the Ehrenberg-Siday paper does seem to exemplify the unfortunate phenomenon identified by Alfred North White-head in a 1916 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science: “Everything of importance has been said before, by someone who did not discover it.”In a companion letter in the April 2010 issue, Alexander Ershkovich correctly points out that the AB effect is present in classical Hamiltonian mechanics, even though remote magnetic fields cannot influence Newtonian trajectories. He advocates a “search for experiments that might prove … a classical analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm effect.” Such an experiment exists already. In the classical physics of waves on a moving medium, the flow velocity acts like the vector potential in quantum mechanics, so the flow vorticity acts like the magnetic field; the analogy is precise. Fine details of the AB wavefunction were observed in ripples on the surface of water swirling irrotationally into a bathtub vortex, 3 3. M. V. Berry, R. G. Chambers, M. D. Large, C. Upstill, J. C. Walmsley, Eur. J. Phys. 1, 154 (1980). whose core is the analogue of inaccessible magnetic flux. REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <<CITING ARTICLES1. W. Ehrenberg, R. E. Siday, Proc. Phys. Soc. B 62, 8 (1949). Google ScholarCrossref2. M. V. Berry, J. Phys. A (in press). Google Scholar3. M. V. Berry, R. G. Chambers, M. D. Large, C. Upstill, J. C. Walmsley, Eur. J. Phys. 1, 154 (1980). Google ScholarCrossref© 2010 American Institute of Physics.

From bench to website

Mol Syst Biol. 6: 410 As the foundation of its guidelines on ‘Sharing Publication‐Related Data and Materials’, the National Research Council of the National Academies formulated a lucid definition of the scientific publishing process: ‘the fundamental purpose of publication of scientific information is to move science forward. More specifically, the act of publishing is a quid pro quo in which authors receive credit and acknowledgment in exchange for disclosure of their scientific findings’ (The National Academies Press, 2003). This definition is appealing as it entails the fundamental principles of scientific publishing: the quality of the published research; the full disclosure of the reported findings; and the attribution of appropriate credits to authors. There has recently been an increasing demand for a more traceable publishing process. At Molecular Systems Biology , we envision this process as the path—‘from bench to website’—leading from the individual data collected in the lab to the final formal report published online. As such, we are determined to provide a more transparent account of how a published work has been evaluated, of what …

The Attribution of Credit and Blame to Governments and Its Impact on Vote Choice

This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Partisanship resolves incongruities between party support and policy evaluation through selective attribution: favoured parties are not blamed for policy failures and less favoured ones are not credited with policy success. Furthermore, attributions caused defections from Labour over the 1997–2001 election cycle in Britain, and defections from the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat coalition over the 2002–07 election cycle in Ireland. Using models of vote switching and controlling for partisanship to minimize endogeneity problems, it is shown that attributed evaluations affect vote intention much more than unattributed evaluations. This result holds across several policy areas and both political systems.

Thoughts on Authorship

The purpose of authorship is to acknowledge the substantial and material contributions of individuals participating in scientific investigation and reporting while avoiding diminution and dilution of their contributions by individuals who have not provided equal or substantial contributions. In general, any scientific investigation requires a given total amount of effort (which obviously varies among studies) and the average contribution directly relates to the number of authors: the larger the number of authors the less the average contribution (see the parse analysis of Davis and Gregorman [9]). The increase in numbers of authors of medical papers is obvious to anyone who has read medical literature for more than 10 to 15 years. In the 1800s and early 1900s, scientific papers were uncommonly written by more than one author. By the mid 1900s, specialization and technical sophistication likely contributed to the beginning trend toward multiple authors. In some cases, the listing reflected “gift authorship” [11, 12, 18, 19]. In many situations, junior investigators undoubtedly felt compelled to include more senior individuals because they made some contribution either to the study and report or to their career, regardless of the level of contribution. An arising awareness of increasing numbers of authors [10, 17] and gift authorship in particular likely fueled in part the development of international editing and publishing groups (eg, Committee on Publication Ethics, Council of Science Editors) dealing with various ethical issues, including authorship. Several editors of orthopaedic journals also have expressed concerns about authorship [2–4]. In general, we request no more than five authors for an original article or four authors for case reports. Exceptions to these guidelines may include authorship for certain multidisciplinary studies, multi-institutional studies, and Levels I or II studies (prospective studies that involve more planning and organization and rigor). As noted previously, manuscripts reflecting studies with greater total effort, particularly in planning and execution, may readily fulfill the guidelines for greater numbers of authors. In all cases, however, multiple contributions of each author must be documented in our cover letter. CORR authorship guidelines are based on an amalgamation of those from several international editing organizations (see below), the Professionalism Guidelines of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, and various articles in the literature [6, 7, 9, 13, 15]. While there is no one accepted standard for authorship, the elements of scientific investigation and reporting are generally established. Our guidelines reflect a synthesis of recommendations from these various organizations and those in the literature.

When Authorship Isn’t Enough: Lessons from CERN on the Implications of Formal and Informal Credit Attribution Mechanisms in Collaborative Research

When Authorship Isn’t Enough: Lessons from CERN on the Implications of Formal and Informal Credit Attribution Mechanisms in Collaborative Research

In this issue

In this issue

Who Captures the Marks for the Petersen Estimator?

SummaryWe examine the claim that the well-known Petersen estimator which is used in population size estimation was not in fact used by the scientist after whom it is named. We show how, in the early years of the last century, the modern use of the Petersen estimator grew from that of the fishing coefficient. Contending with the somewhat conflicting claims that were made at the time, and what by modern standards is poor referencing of sources, we investigate where the credit lies for these concepts, and the principles and protocols which support them. We assess also how far attributions of credit were affected by practical considerations, and the history of the estimator by the nature of the problems being pursued. We identify scientists whose early work on marking and estimating fish populations deserves more credit than it has received.

ASIS Award of Merit: On the Shoulders of Giants

ASIS Award of Merit: On the Shoulders of Giants

Getting Off to a Good Start: The Effects of Upper Echelon Affiliations on Underwriter Prestige

The initial public offering (IPO) is one of the most critical events in the lifetime of a young firm. Prior research has shown that firms tend to have successful IPOs if they go public with the endorsement of a prestigious lead underwriter. This paper examines the antecedents to receiving endorsement by a prestigious underwriter and links this to the experience base of a firm's upper echelon. We theorize that the amount and type of upper echelon experience serve as important symbols of a young firm's legitimacy to critical outsiders. We introduce a typology of upper echelon experience that distinguishes between upper echelon upstream, horizontal, and downstream employment-based affiliations and suggest that these different types of upper echelon affiliations allay different types of endorser concerns regarding firm legitimacy, affecting the endorsement process. Further, we theorize that the relationships between upper echelon experience and investment bank prestige will be moderated by technological uncertainty. We test our assertions on a comprehensive sample of public and private biotechnology firms that were founded between 1961 and 1994 and that went public between 1979 and 1996. Analyses of the five-year career histories of the over 3,200 executives and directors that make up the upper echelons of these firms show that firms with upper echelons with affiliations with prominent downstream organizations (i.e., pharmaceutical and/or healthcare companies) and with prominent horizontal organizations (i.e., biotechnology companies) are more likely to attract the endorsement of a prestigious investment bank. We also find that the greater the range of upper echelon affiliations across the categories of upstream, horizontal, and downstream affiliations, the more prestigious the firm's lead underwriter. We also find that these latter results are moderated by technological uncertainty. The present research has implications for the study of organizational legitimacy, interorganizational endorsements, and entrepreneurship.

WHO OUGHT TO BE BLAMED? THE EFFECT OF ORGANIZATIONAL ROLES ON BLAME AND CREDIT ATTRIBUTIONS

Attributing blame for performance failure and credit for success is ubiquitous in organizations. These responsibility attributions can play an important role in aligning individual and organizational performance expectations, but may also exacerbate conflict in groups and organizations. Theory suggests that an actor's organizational role will affect blame and credit attributions, yet empirical work on this prediction is lacking. This article tests an organizational role approach by assessing the effect of the responsible actor's hierarchical position and whether he or she acted as an individual or as part of a group on blame and credit attributions. The study finds that in response to organizational failures and successes leadership roles attract more blame than other positions, but in contrast to previous predictions, these roles do not attract more credit than lower level roles. In addition, upper level positions tend to be assigned greater blame than credit, while lower level positions show a reversed pattern: they attract more credit than blame. Groups are less likely to be assigned blame and more likely to be credited than are individuals, and occupants in flat organizational structures are assigned higher levels of blame and credit than are occupants in taller organizational structures.

Guidelines for authorship

Three of the senior editors have undertaken a process to consider and improve the system of attribution of credit and responsibility inherent in the authorship of scientific articles published in The Journal of Arthroplasty. This process has included careful considerations of the issues and available options and has encouraged input from the entire editorial board. It also included a thorough review of the available literature on this topic. The problem of authorship and related issues of integrity has been widely discussed in a variety of editorials and scientific publications including The Journal of The American Medical Association, The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and other publications.The impetus for this study has been the observation that there is a widespread trend toward more authors, more “senior” authors, and misapplication of authorship at levels as high as 25%.A consensus of the editorial board has developed the following guidelines specific to authorship that we hope will be useful to authors and will improve the quality of the manuscripts considered:1.Each author is responsible for the content and accuracy of the entire manuscript, with the exception of students, residents, and fellows. Each author should participate in the content and design of the study, the preparation of the manuscript and its revisions, and final approval.2.“Gift authors” and “ghostwriters” should be excluded.3.A maximum of 6 authors will be allowed.4.Other individuals who contribute effort to the process should be identified as “contributors” and acknowledged at the end of the manuscript together with their contribution.5.The order and inclusion should be decided by consensus among the authors themselves and acknowledged in writing.6.In-text citations should include the first and second authors' names.7.The authors should clearly indicate the predominant surgeon or surgeons who have contributed patients. Contributing patients is not sufficient in and of itself to merit authorship.8.Adherence to these policies will be encouraged but voluntary.It is our hope that these modifications will be taken in a positive spirit and help authors to achieve the goals we would all find laudatory. Three of the senior editors have undertaken a process to consider and improve the system of attribution of credit and responsibility inherent in the authorship of scientific articles published in The Journal of Arthroplasty. This process has included careful considerations of the issues and available options and has encouraged input from the entire editorial board. It also included a thorough review of the available literature on this topic. The problem of authorship and related issues of integrity has been widely discussed in a variety of editorials and scientific publications including The Journal of The American Medical Association, The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and other publications. The impetus for this study has been the observation that there is a widespread trend toward more authors, more “senior” authors, and misapplication of authorship at levels as high as 25%. A consensus of the editorial board has developed the following guidelines specific to authorship that we hope will be useful to authors and will improve the quality of the manuscripts considered:1.Each author is responsible for the content and accuracy of the entire manuscript, with the exception of students, residents, and fellows. Each author should participate in the content and design of the study, the preparation of the manuscript and its revisions, and final approval.2.“Gift authors” and “ghostwriters” should be excluded.3.A maximum of 6 authors will be allowed.4.Other individuals who contribute effort to the process should be identified as “contributors” and acknowledged at the end of the manuscript together with their contribution.5.The order and inclusion should be decided by consensus among the authors themselves and acknowledged in writing.6.In-text citations should include the first and second authors' names.7.The authors should clearly indicate the predominant surgeon or surgeons who have contributed patients. Contributing patients is not sufficient in and of itself to merit authorship.8.Adherence to these policies will be encouraged but voluntary. It is our hope that these modifications will be taken in a positive spirit and help authors to achieve the goals we would all find laudatory.

'Distributing Discovery' between Watt and Cavendish: A Reassessment of the Nineteenth-Century 'Water Controversy'

Contention about who discovered the compound nature of water (the 'water controversy') occurred in two phases. During the first phase, in the 1780s, the claimants to the discovery (Antoine Lavoisier, Henry Cavendish, and James Watt) produced the work on which their claims were based. This phase of controversy was relatively short and did not generate much heat, although it was part of the larger debates surrounding the 'chemical revolution'. The second phase of controversy, in the 1830s and 1840s, saw heated exchanges in Britain between advocates of Watt on the one hand and of Cavendish on the other. This paper concentrates on this second phase. The concern is not to arbitrate the contest but to delineate the pattern of advocacy and the arguments used to support the opposing cases. 'Discovery' is not treated as an event but as the outcome of an after-the-fact process of attribution of credit. Apart from identifying the opposing argumentative strategies employed in making different attributions, the paper also seeks to explain why there was so much concern about this priority dispute long after the deaths of the protagonists. It is shown that while Scottish-English rivalries were important they were not the only or most significant impetus. Ideological struggles over the nature of science provided a context in which the attribution of discovery to Cavendish or to Watt was of major import. These ideological struggles are shown to have roots in the politics of early Victorian science that ultimately lay behind the second phase of the water controversy and shaped the course that it took.

Ethnicity and credit in African manufacturing

This paper investigates whether market interaction can, by itself, perpetuate the lack of ethnic diversity that is observed in the business communities of many developing countries. Using case study data on manufacturing firms in Kenya and Zimbabwe, we find no evidence that blacks or women are disadvantaged in the attribution of bank credit once we control for firm size and other observable characteristics. In contrast, an ethnic and gender bias is noticeable in the attribution of supplier credit. Although we cannot rule out the presence of discrimination, the bulk of the evidence indicates that network effects play an important role in explaining this bias.

Veblen’s Possible Influence on the New Deal Land-Utilization Program as Evidenced by His Student Claud Franklin Clayton

While there is considerable indirect evidence of Thorstein Veblen's influences upon New Deal policies, there are relatively few direct attributions of credit to him [Tilman 1988]. In this paper, I present one of the rarer cases of direct evidence by describing the New Deal career of economist Claud Franklin Clayton (1890-1968), who studied under Veblen at the University of Missouri. Leonard A. Salter Jr., the major historiographer of the development of land economics, ranks Clayton along with W. J. Spillman and Lewis C. Gray as the three leading figures in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the formative years of land economics research up to World War II [Salter 1967, 244]. Clayton's career added significant content to Veblen's principles and reveals the influence of Veblen's insights as applied during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Possibly Clayton's finest contributions came as the righthand man to Gray in planning and overseeing the federal government's submarginal land-utilization program of the 1930s, and the origin of Clayton's contributions can be traced to his study under Veblen. This article correlates the thought of Veblen and Clayton. Clayton earned his bachelor's (1915) and master's (1916) degrees in sociology at the University of Missouri. While majoring in sociology, he also took graduatelevel economics courses from Herbert J. Davenport and Veblen. Clayton's master's thesis, The Theory of Social Unity, which was supervised by Charles A. Ellwood, was a study in social psychology and particularly social solidarity. In his thesis, there is this acknowledgment to Veblen:

Testing Credit and Blame Attributions as Explanation for Choices under Ambiguity

People make decisions every day based on their estimates of the chances of various events occurring. By their very nature, these subjective estimates are less certain, and thus more ambiguous, than objective probabilities such as those associated with roulette wheels or lotteries. In two experimental studies, we investigate choices between bets on the decision maker′s knowledge versus bets on a lottery with the same chance of winning. In Study 1, we partially replicate the Heath and Tversky (1991) finding that subjects have an increasing preference for betting on their own knowledge over the matched-chance lottery as probability increases. We also discover a significant minority of subjects who exhibit the opposite pattern and prefer the lottery as probability increases. In addition, we explicitly test the subjects′ attributions about the credit they would feel for a win and the blame they would feel for a loss, and these attributions do provide some explanation for their choice behavior. In Study 2, we manipulate knowledge and accountability, in an attempt to heighten the attributions of credit and blame, and we replicate the findings.

Adaptive perceptual pattern recognition by self-organizing neural networks: Context, uncertainty, multiplicity, and scale

A new context-sensitive neural network, called an EXIN (excitatory + inhibitory) network, is described. EXIN networks self-organize in complex perceptual environments, in the presence of multiple superimposed patterns, multiple scales, and uncertainty. The networks use a new inhibitory learning rule, in addition to an excitatory learning rule, to allow superposition of multiple simultaneous neural activations (multiple winners), under strictly regulated circumstances, instead of forcing winner-take-all pattern classifications. The multiple activations represent uncertainty or multiplicity in perception and pattern recognition. Perceptual scission (breaking of linkages) between independent category groupings thus arises and allows effective global context-sensitive segmentation, constraint satisfaction, and exclusive credit attribution. A Weber Law neuron growth rule lets the network learn and classify input patterns despite variations in their spatial scale. Applications of the new techniques include segmentation of superimposed auditory or biosonar signals, segmentation of visual regions, and representation of visual transparency.

Portuguese Children's Judgements of Moral, Prosocial, and Academic Norms: Duty or Aspiration?

Borrowing from Fuller's distinction between duty and aspiration, we examined Portuguese children's attributions of credit and blame for good and bad deeds in moral, prosocial, and academic norms. In addition, we made crosscultural comparisons with US and Japanese children, and suggested that the frequently reported tendency for children to give more weight to negative outcomes than positive ones may be due to a common belief (i.e. "fundamental-education error") that states that people should not have to be praised for doing what they should do, but should always be blamed or punished for misbehaviour. A total of 81 children aged from 5 to 10 were presented with moral, prosocial, and academic scenarios representing either adherences to, or violations of, norms. Children's own judgements of credit and blame, and children's predictions of what their teachers would do if forced to choose between sanctioning a positive and a negative act were assessed. The results showed that: (1) Portuguese children's attributions of credit and blame for moral and academic norms were similar to those observed for US and Japanese children with regard to a rank order of domains, but not in absolute terms; (2) at an early age, Portuguese children commit the "fundamental-education error"; and (3) the duty-aspiration asymmetry is not as pervasive as has been claimed.

Preference and belief: Ambiguity and competence in choice under uncertainty

We investigate the relation between judgments of probability and preferences between bets. A series of experiments provides support for the competence hypothesis that people prefer betting on their own judgment over an equiprobable chance event when they consider themselves knowledgeable, but not otherwise. They even pay a significant premium to bet on their judgments. These data connot be explained by aversion to ambiguity, because judgmental probabilities are more ambiguous than chance events. We interpret the results in terms of the attribution of credit and blame. The possibility of inferring beliefs from preferences is questioned.1