We see more and more articles co-authored with a long list of contributors. However, as it is common practice to list the contributions of each author, we see that some co-authors have minor contribution, like only editing the paper, a supervising role, or providing a piece of equipment for the experiment. For some scientist these type of articles with minor contributions constitute more than half of their total publications. Those scientists will publish over 20 articles every year, which seems impressive, but in reality, they only have a minor contribution on each of these articles when they have one. Indeed, it becomes common to see scientists having a friendly agreement with each other (I put you on my articles, if you put me on your articles).
This contributes to create inflated CVs that can be unfair when it comes to hiring a new faculty, promotion, or tenure acquisition. It also dilutes the real contribution of the authors that did most of the work.
Therefore, do you think Editors and journals should ask to drop co-authors that didn't contributed significantly to a study?
Dear Quentin, thank you very much for this question. I think we do, especially as their name can be added in the acknowledgments section by specifying their contribution. At the very least, recruiters, scientific program managers and funders should pay close attention to this practice. Just my point of view.
I agree. We should acknowledge the acknowledgement section more. It is obvious that research can't be done alone, but also that it usually isn't done by >10 authors (if not even >1-3). If coauthors provided data, datasets or data papers should be cited or, if this data is unpublished, there could be a section about contributed data or similar. That said, the first aim should be first publishing data that can get citations. We are already moving towards a higher credit for data provision and data papers - this is not worse than any other citation or publication.
Regarding the supervision, this depends on how strongly supervisors have been involved. However, other disciplines are even more restrictive in their authorship: even if supervisors and colleagues contributed (ideas, discussions, solutions), they would only list the first author(s) of the paper as authors. I like the approach as it makes it easier identifying who actually did the work and as it also enables us more easily to interact and discuss our findings with each other prior to publication (and without having in mind authorship or credit). This works also for editing the paper: editing could be done on the agreement basis (I read yours, you read mine). No disadvantages for anyone (right?). Instead, you can motivate yourself/ make time to read the work of colleagues. This usually leads to new ideas for your own projects, new concepts/tools/methods you didn't know about before or simply you learning something new.
In addition, having less authors on papers may help against the race in "fake" number of publications in CVs, as you described, Xavier Martini. We don't need 10 new papers per year; we need high quality research presented in a suitable way (which can be a paper, a dataset, a software or else). And if it is a larger project, it might take 2 years. Why not? It is not a gap in our CV when we conduct a long-term study. And even if it would be a gap, who was actually doing nothing during gaps in CV? We should values what was done and how, not how much of it.
One's name appearing on a paper that a credible scientific journal has accepted facilitates acquiring a visa for work outside of one's native country. That is a significant benefit. It also helps in the immigration process. If one so chooses.
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