Claiming Credit in the Interdisciplinary Age

These days, the term “credit crisis” invokes thoughts of Wall Street and financial debt. But in the scientific enterprise, structural changes are affecting core issues of intellectual credit and indebtedness as well as taking responsibility when problems arise. Following is an in-depth discussion and proposed solution from distinguished scientist and author Michael Domjan, who has experienced these issues as a researcher, editor, and administrator.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the major figures in psychology were scientific loners, battling for dominance of the field. They typically developed independent lines of research and pretty much ignored everyone else’s work. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior (1953), which was used as an introductory psychology text at Harvard, did not have a single citation to anyone else’s writings. Many were happy to have graduate students help them conduct their research and disseminate their ideas, but collaborations rarely extended beyond that. A given project rarely had more than one or two contributors, and it was easy tell who did what and who deserved the credit (or discredit).

We now operate in a very different world. The number of authors on publications is increasing, and often the collaborators are not graduate students but scientists from other laboratories and disciplines. This trend is evident in all fields of science (Wuchty, Jones, & Uzzi, 2007) and is an inevitable consequence of interdisciplinary research.

“Interdisciplinary” and “transdisciplinary” have almost become buzz words, but they signify much more than just fashionable labels. Their commonplace use reflects the fact that deep understanding of a problem often requires the coordinated efforts of a range of scientists who are expert at different levels of analysis and employ different specialized techniques. The importance of these issues has commanded the attention of APS President John Cacioppo in several of his recent columns in the Observer (Cacioppo, 2007a, b). As Cacioppo points out, psychology has much to contribute to interdisciplinary efforts, and interdisciplinary and collaborative research will play an increasingly important if not dominant role in psychological science. This shift will require changes in how we deal with issues of scientific credit and responsibility.

I have spent most of my professional life doing single-laboratory science, as is typical of psychologists who started in the field in the late 1960s. I had several research collaborators along the way, and I enjoyed worked with them, but most of my research started and ended in my own lab, where it was easy to identify who was responsible for, and should receive credit for, various aspects of the work. Determining credit and responsibility became more difficult when I had to evaluate research produced in other laboratories during my service as a journal editor and later as chair of the department of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. But issues of scientific credit and responsibility have been even more challenging in my current position as director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC) at The University of Texas. The primary research modality at the IRC is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which was developed through the concerted efforts of physicists, electrical engineers, biomedical engineers, neurobiologists, computer scientists, and others. I had to hire an in-house staff (none of whom are psychologists) and work on hiring faculty in psychology, neurobiology, physics, and biomedical engineering. All of these tasks required assessments of scientific accomplishment. Unfortunately, determining who is responsible for, and deserves credit for, a scientific finding is becoming increasingly difficult.

Credit Reports
My first encounter with the credit-assignment problem occurred when I was a journal editor. A serious problem arose with a multiauthored paper that was published in the journal. The problem was of sufficient gravity to warrant publishing a retraction. The authors agreed on what the problem was and which of them had committed the error. The only remaining issue was whose name should appear on the retraction. The original publication did not spell out which author was responsible for which aspect of the research. I argued that all of the original authors needed to sign the retraction, which they eventually did. Authorship is both credit and responsibility. I wonder how often graduate students eager for authorship consider that if you accept credit you also have to accept whatever discredit may befall the publication down the road.

Another memorable encounter with the credit-assignment problem occurred during a discussion I had as department chair with a faculty member who was applying for tenure. The tenure process required specifying the percentage of effort that was contributed by the candidate to each of their publications. In this case, several of the candidate’s publications included numerous authors. I pointed to one of these and asked how much of the work in the publication was done by the candidate. The reply was “80 percent.” This claim immediately raised another question: if the candidate did 80 percent of the work, why were there four other authors? Assuming that those four other authors contributed equally, does a 5 percent contribution warrant authorship? Not in my view. Furthermore, how is a reader to discern that the relative contributions of the authors ranged from 5 percent to 80 percent? By convention, the order of authorship is supposed to convey some information about relative contributions, but I doubt that anyone expects that the variation in credit and responsibility would range from 5 percent to 80 percent.

On another occasion I served as a judge in a poster contest open to graduate students and postdocs. The award was to go to a single individual. One of the projects was outstanding and clearly worthy of the award. It described an interdisciplinary project that involved behavioral testing, genetics, and electrophysiology. There were nine authors on the poster. The presenter was eloquent, erudite, and convincing in describing the results, but said nothing about who was responsible for what aspect of the work. When queried more closely about the assignment of responsibility, it became clear that the presenter had no involvement with a couple of critical aspects of the project. Needless to say, the award went to someone else.

The above examples illustrate some of the areas in which the uninformative nature of authorship lists creates significant problems in making informed professional decisions. Another important area is in hiring decisions. When you are trying to hire someone, you are looking for a specific set of skills. However, just because someone is an author on a paper that uses a special technique does not mean that he actually know how to use that technique. Authorship no longer ensures that the person was responsible for formulating the research question, that he was responsible for the literature review, that he did or could have performed the data analyses, or that he wrote any portions of the final manuscript. At some level we all know this, and for that reason we do not make hiring decisions based entirely on someone’s curriculum vitae. However, we do make significant decisions based on CVs, namely which candidates to put on a “short list” and examine more closely.

Credit Crisis
Interdisciplinary research projects involve bringing people with different skills together to work on a common problem. Each member of the team presumably contributes a different area of expertise. With well functioning research teams, each member also learns some of the language and concepts of others at the table. All of that is to be applauded. Problems can arise, however, when members of interdisciplinary teams begin to claim expertise that is actually contributed by others on the team. I have heard colleagues talk about how they are now doing imaging research, when I know that they have no idea what is involved in collecting MRI data. I have also heard colleagues talk about “doing genetics” or “doing hormone assays,” when in fact what they are doing is sending out samples for someone else to analyze and interpret.

The credit-assignment problem is also often evident when someone describes the results of interdisciplinary research in conference presentations, colloquia, and other scientific gatherings. It has become common to provide a list of collaborators, usually at the end of the talk. Such lists are typically organized by level of professional accomplishment (graduate students, postdocs, faculty colleagues) or by institution. Rarely are we told who did what. I applaud speakers who identify their colleagues during their presentations, as they discuss various aspects of the work. It seems that senior scientists are more likely to do that than junior colleagues. I have been particularly frustrated by job candidates who describe the full range of work that is being done in a highly productive laboratory, without making clear what part of the work is actually their contribution.

Why does all this matter? After all, isn’t the science what is most important rather than who does it? If we truly believed that, we should be satisfied with research publications that do not list any authors or only listed them in alphabetical order. Obviously, that is not a world order that anyone would subscribe to. Authors appear on papers because we need to know who was responsible for the work and who should receive credit (or discredit) for it. This assignment of credit and responsibility is then used in all facets of scientific life. Prospective graduate students use it in deciding which lab to join. University administrators use the information in hiring and promotion decisions, and in deciding how much lab space or graduate student support a faculty member should receive. Granting agencies use the information to decide which proposals to fund. The one area where this information is sometimes not used is in the anonymous submission process that is available with some journals. But, even with anonymous submissions, it is often pretty easy to guess whose lab was responsible for the research.

A New Approach
Given the importance of the proper assignment of scientific credit and responsibility, we should work to improve the current system. We cannot legislate against colleagues who overstate their competence or award authorships based on an exchange of favors. However, we can work to make the process of assigning scientific credit and responsibility more transparent and open to public scrutiny. A good place to start would be to require a statement in all multi-authored publications that spells out what each author contributed to the final product. Authors may disagree among themselves as to who did what. The requirement of a statement of contributions would not circumvent such disputes but it would at least force a discussion among the authors and encourage them to arrive at a statement that they are prepared to defend in public. Such statements would also allow directors of laboratories to see each other’s reasons for inclusion in the authorship list and may help to create more uniform standards for authorship credit.

The suggestion that authors disclose their individual contributions to a collaborative project has been discussed in the medical literature for at least 20 years (Huth, 1986). In a recent reaffirmation of this suggestion, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2007) stated that in dealing with multiple authorship “editors are strongly encouraged to develop and implement a contributorship policy” to clarify what each author did on the project. It may be time to develop such a policy for psychological science as well. ♦

References

Cacioppo, J.T. (2007). The rise of collaborative psychological science. Observer, 20 (9), 3 and 52.
Cacioppo, J.T. (2007). Better interdisciplinary research through psychological science. Observer, 20 (10), 3 and 48-49.
Huth, E.J. (1986). Irresponsible authorship and wasteful publication. Annals of Internal Medicine, 104, 257-259.
International Committee on Medical Journal Editors. (2007). Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals: Writing and editing for biomedical publication. Retrieved from www.icmje.org.
Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan.
Wuchty, S., Jones, B.F., & Uzzi, B. (2007). The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science, 316 (5827), 1036-1039.