andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1917 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: The other day I posted some remarks on Stan Liebowitz’s analysis of coauthorship in economics. Liebowitz followed up with some more thoughts: I [Liebowitz] am not arguing for an increase or decrease in coauthorship, per se. I would prefer an efficient amount of coauthorship, whatever that is, and certainly it will vary by paper and by field. If you feel you are more productive with many coauthors, that is not in contrast to anything in my paper. My point is that you will pick the correct number of coauthors if you and your coauthors are given 1/n credit (assuming you believe each author contributed equally). If, however, all of the coauthors are given full credit for the paper (and I have evidence that, in economics at least, authors are far more likely to receive full credit than 1/n credit), authors will get credit for more papers if they use more coauthors than would otherwise be best for total research productivity. My criticism is in the inefficiency induced by not using 1/n
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 The other day I posted some remarks on Stan Liebowitz’s analysis of coauthorship in economics. [sent-1, score-0.377]
2 My point is that you will pick the correct number of coauthors if you and your coauthors are given 1/n credit (assuming you believe each author contributed equally). [sent-5, score-1.43]
3 My criticism is in the inefficiency induced by not using 1/n as the reward system. [sent-7, score-0.216]
4 [I assume, I think reasonably, that increasing the number of real authors eventually causes too big a team and that productivity falls (too many cooks). [sent-8, score-0.312]
5 ] A particular form of excessive coauthorship consists of gratuitously putting friends on a paper. [sent-9, score-0.736]
6 This form of excessive coauthorship doesn’t actually hurt research productivity since gratuitous authors have nothing to do with writing the paper. [sent-10, score-0.977]
7 Gratuitous coauthorship is a rational (although unethical) response by authors to a reward system that does not give 1/n credit. [sent-11, score-0.687]
8 I’ve been involved in almost every authorship situation. [sent-13, score-0.169]
9 I’ve added coauthors who’ve written just a couple paragraphs. [sent-14, score-0.567]
10 I don’t remove the old authors even after they’ve stopped contributing. [sent-17, score-0.206]
11 I once had a project I did entirely myself, but at the time I was feeling paranoid so I approached two colleagues—not friends, just two people I slightly knew—and invited them on to the project. [sent-18, score-0.208]
12 They contributed a lot to the papers that got written, but originally I included them only because I was afraid that any paper with myself as sole author wouldn’t get taken seriously. [sent-19, score-0.409]
13 I was once deeply involved in a research project—at one point I was dictating formulas to my coauthor over the phone—and then I was stunned to find that my coauthor did not want to include my name on the project as a coauthor, he just wanted to thank me in the acknowledgments. [sent-20, score-0.924]
14 The publisher recommended that, even though all five of us were officially authors, and we were all on the title page, that my name alone should be on the cover, so it would sell more books, because nobody wants to read a book with five authors. [sent-22, score-0.444]
15 I discussed it with my coauthors and we followed the publisher’s suggestion, but I regret it. [sent-23, score-0.628]
16 Once or twice I’ve done collaborative projects and then seen papers floating around with our work but without my name on it. [sent-26, score-0.454]
17 Conversely, I’ve been coauthor on collaborative projects where I’ve done very little. [sent-27, score-0.542]
18 Once I wrote a paper with an economist—it was a joint effort, he had the original idea but I wrote most of the paper. [sent-28, score-0.206]
19 Once I insisted on a reverse-alphabetical authorship for a paper just to ensure that my end-of-alphabet coauthor would get the appropriate share of credit. [sent-30, score-0.614]
20 I listed George Romero as a coauthor on the zombies paper, just because. [sent-31, score-0.292]
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Introduction: The other day I posted some remarks on Stan Liebowitz’s analysis of coauthorship in economics. Liebowitz followed up with some more thoughts: I [Liebowitz] am not arguing for an increase or decrease in coauthorship, per se. I would prefer an efficient amount of coauthorship, whatever that is, and certainly it will vary by paper and by field. If you feel you are more productive with many coauthors, that is not in contrast to anything in my paper. My point is that you will pick the correct number of coauthors if you and your coauthors are given 1/n credit (assuming you believe each author contributed equally). If, however, all of the coauthors are given full credit for the paper (and I have evidence that, in economics at least, authors are far more likely to receive full credit than 1/n credit), authors will get credit for more papers if they use more coauthors than would otherwise be best for total research productivity. My criticism is in the inefficiency induced by not using 1/n
Introduction: Economist Stan Liebowitz has a longstanding interest in the difficulties of flagging published research errors. Recently he wrote on the related topic of dishonest authorship: While not about direct research fraud, I thought you might be interested in this paper . It discusses the manner in which credit is given for economics articles, and I suspect it applies to many other areas as well. One of the conclusions is that the lack of complete proration per author will lead to excessive coauthorship, reducing overall research output by inducing the use of larger than efficient-sized teams. Under these circumstances, false authorship can be a response to the warped reward system and false authorship might improve research efficiency since it might keep actual research teams (as opposed to nominal teams) from being too large to produce research efficiently. One of the questions I rhetorically ask in the paper is whether anyone has ever been ‘punished’ for having their name included on
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