The
Letters in the March 2005 issue of PHYSICS TODAY (page 12) in response to Mohamed Gad-el-Hak's Opinion
piece (March 2004, page 61) on citation rates and impact factors show how important these criteria
have become for hiring, tenure, and promotion, and suggest some models that may result in undesirable,
unintended consequences. In particular, the suggestion by Loc Vu-Quoc that multiple-author
publications be divided in some fashion according to the number of authors might result in having
nervous faculty members delete students and important support staff as coauthors and relegate
them to acknowledgments.
The notion that all coauthors are equally responsible for
content is not valid in many fields; in solid-state physics, crystal growers, with or without PhD
degrees, are not technicians but highly skilled collaborators of equal standing, and students
may often play a more important role in that field than in theoretical physics. When I was at Bell
Labs (1966–72), no one thought that Howard Guggenheim or Joe Remeika should be responsible
for the detailed theoretical analyses of data on their superb crystals, but it would have been unethical
not to list them as coauthors; they had grown the world's best specimens of new materials.
The law of unintended consequences has many examples in
life; one such story, albeit apocryphal, is that of rat extermination in Singapore. According
to the anecdote, a bounty of, say, a few cents was offered for each dead rat turned in to the authorities.
Within days numerous rats were delivered, and the numbers dropped quickly as the extermination
neared completion. Surprisingly, however, after two weeks the numbers suddenly shot up. Young
boys were breeding rats! In a similar vein, if the formulas Vu-Quoc proposes were implemented,
we might see a sudden explosion in the number of short, single-author publications by untenured
faculty members. Probably these would have about the same value as the rats in Singapore.
Vu-Quoc replies: James Scott describes a knee-jerk reaction of short-sighted authors who focus on
getting more credit for a single paper but lose sight of the bigger picture.
Ethical guidelines such as those of the American Chemical
Society1 clearly state that "the coauthors of a paper should be all those persons who
have made significant scientific contributions to the work." Most authors would follow these
guidelines and share the credit—and sometimes the blame—for the work.2,3
Many journals already require each author of a paper to state
his or her contribution.4 Coauthors are sometimes listed for ethically questionable
reasons.5 Inflated authorship, like inflated grades, devalues authentic authorship,
does not contribute to good education, and misleads potential employers. The author impact factor
(AIF) is a statistical average over a collection of papers. Its unintended consequence is to promote
effective and genuine collaboration, good collaborative work, and adherence to the ethical guidelines
for authors.1
Instead of such narrow issues as, for example, trying to
get more credit for a paper, the AIF concept, with its robustness against database errors, addresses
much more broadly the challenges of ranking the publication impact (reputation) of heterogeneous
groups of researchers—for example, for use in the ranking of doctoral programs.
References
1.American Chemical Society, Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research, January 2000, available at [LINK]; see also American Physical Society, Supplementary Guidelines on Responsibilities of Coauthors and Collaborators, [LINK].
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