Readings selected and compiled by Brad Taylor

Friedland, A. J. and C. L. Folt. 2000. Writing Successful Science Proposals. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Authorship Guidelines

1 of 3

https://www.msu.edu/~vprgs/authorshipguidelines.htm

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY GUIDELINES ON AUTHORSHIP

Adopted by the University Research Council

January 15, 1998

(To apply to all academic units which have not adopted their own written policies)

1. Authorship - A person claiming authorship of a scholarly publication must have met the following criteria:
a. Substantial participation in conception and design of the study, or in analysis and interpretation of data;
b. Substantial participation in the drafting of the manuscript or in the substantive editing of the manuscript;
c. Final approval of the version of the manuscript to be published;
d. Ability to explain and defend the study in public or scholarly settings.
e. (Note: these criteria follow closely those recommended by several professional associations. See especially the
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Annals of Internal Medicine 1988; 108: 258-65.)

2. Acknowledgment - Contributions that do not justify authorship should be acknowledged separately in the notes to the
manuscript. These may include general supervision of a research group, assistance in obtaining funding, or technical
support.

3. Honorary Authorship - A claim of authorship by, or assignment of authorship to, persons who may have been associated
in some way with a study but do not meet the four criteria in item 1 may constitute an unethical research practice.

4. Graduate Student Authorship - Faculty should be especially aware of their responsibility to safeguard the rights of

10/29/2008 11:08 AM

Authorship Guidelines

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https://www.msu.edu/~vprgs/authorshipguidelines.htm

graduate students to publish the results of their research. (MSU Research Handbook, 1985, p. 16, section 4.3.1.)

5. Senior Author and Order of Authorship - The senior author is generally defined as the person who leads a study and makes a
major contribution to the work. All the authors at the outset of a project should establish senior authorship, preferably in a
written memorandum of understanding. This memorandum of understanding should reference the authors agreement to
abide by their departments policy on authorship or this University default policy on authorship. At the outset of the study
the Senior Author should discuss the outline of work and a tentative Order of Authorship with the study participants. As
projects proceed, agreements regarding authorship may need to be changed. It is the responsibility of the senior author to
assure that the contributions of study participants are properly recognized.

6. Disputes Over Authorship - Disagreements over authorship, e.g. who has a right to be an author or the order of authorship,
should be resolved by the Senior Author in collegial consultation with the other authors. When this process cannot reach
resolution, the Senior Author should arrange with his or her chairperson for arbitration by a knowledgeable and disinterested
third party acceptable to all the authors. If the authors cannot agree on a mutually acceptable arbitrator, then the Vice
President for Research and Graduate Studies shall appoint an arbitrator. During the arbitration process all the authors are
expected to refrain from unilateral actions that may damage the authorship interests and rights of the other authors.

7. Accountability - Every author listed on a publication is presumed to have approved the final version of the manuscript. Each
author is responsible for the integrity of the research being reported.

8. Plagiarism -The word plagiarism is derived from the Latin plagiarius, an abductor, and plagiare, to steal. The expropriation
of another authors text, and the presentation of it as ones own, constitutes plagiarism. Plagiarism, in turn, constitutes
misconduct in scholarship under University policies and procedures. Plagiarism in scholarly projects should be reported to
ones chairperson, dean, or the University Intellectual Integrity Officer. (American Historical Association, Statements on
Standards, 1993, p. 13)

9. Distribution -This policy should be widely distributed, especially to each new faculty, graduate student and research staff
member in academic units.

10/29/2008 11:08 AM

Correspondence

Author Sequence and Credit for

Contributions in Multiauthored
Publications

Table 1. Comparison of the Credit for Contributions to This

Paper under the Four Different Models Suggested in the Text

Teja Tscharntke*, Michael E. Hochberg, Tatyana A.

Rand, Vincent H. Resh, Jochen Krauss
The increasing tendency across scientic disciplines to
write multiauthored papers [1,2] makes the issue of the
sequence of contributors names a major topic both in
terms of reecting actual contributions and in a posteriori
assessments by evaluation committees. Traditionally, the
rst author contributes most and also receives most of the
credit, whereas the position of subsequent authors is usually
decided by contribution, alphabetical order, or reverse
seniority. Ranking the rst or second author in a two-author
paper is straightforward, but the meaning of position
becomes increasingly arbitrary as the number of authors
increases beyond two. Criteria for authorship have been
discussed at length, because of the inationary increase in
the number of authors on papers submitted to biomedical
journals and the practice of gift authorship [3,4], but a
simple way to determine credit associated with the sequence
of authors names is still missing [47] (http://www.
councilscienceeditors.org).
The situation in our area of researchthe ecological
and environmental scienceshas changed in recent years.
Following informal practices in the biomedical sciences,
the last author often gets as much credit as the rst author,
because he or she is assumed to be the driving force, both
intellectually and nancially, behind the research. Evaluation
committees and funding bodies often take last authorship as a
sign of successful group leadership and make this a criterion
in hiring, granting, and promotion. This practice is unofcial,
and hence not always followed, meaning that sometimes
last authors mistakenly benet when they actually are
not principal investigators. Moreover, there is no accepted
yardstick in assessing the actual contribution of a group
leader to given scientic publications [8,9], so interpretation
of author sequence can be like a lottery. Hence, one really
does not know if being last author means that the overall
contribution was the most or least important.
Although reducing evaluation of authors complex
contributions to simple metrics is regrettable, in reality it is
already in practice in most evaluation committees. Hence, in
our opinion, we need a simple and straightforward approach
to estimate the credit associated with the sequence of
authors names that is free from any arbitrary rank valuation.
In multiauthored papers, the rst author position should
clearly be assigned to the individual making the greatest
contribution [46], as is common practice. However, authors
often adopt different methods of crediting contributions
for the following authors, because of very different
traditions across countries and research elds, resulting in
very different criteria that committees adopt to quantify
authors contributions [8,9]. For example, some authors use
alphabetical sequence, while others think that the last author
position has great importance or that the second author
position is the second most important. Still others detail each
authors contribution in a footnote.
PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org

Author

SDC

EC

FLAE

PCI

Contribution
(%) for PCI

Traditional
Credit

TT
MEH
TAR
VHR
JK
Sum

14.7
7.3
4.9
3.7
2.9
33.5

2.9
2.9
2.9
2.9
2.9
14.5

14.7
2.9
2.9
2.9
7.4
30.8

8.8
2.9
1.5
0.7
0.7
14.6

60
20
10
5
5
100

14.7
14.7
14.7
14.7
14.7
73.5

The credit is based on the impact factor, which is 14.7 (2005) for PLoS Biology. The
traditional but informal practice of giving the whole credit to all authors may be the most
attractive, but often least justied approach.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050018.t001

We suggest that the approach taken should be stated in

the acknowledgements section, and evaluation committees
are asked to weigh the contribution of each author based on
the criteria given by the authors. This would make reviewers
aware that there are different cultures to authorship order.
The usual and informal practice of giving the whole credit
(impact factor) to each author of a multiauthored paper is
not adequate and overemphasises the minor contributions
of many authors (Table 1). Similarly, evaluation of authors
according to citation frequencies means often overrating
resulting from high-impact but multiauthored publications.
The following approaches may be identied.
(1) The sequence-determines-credit approach (SDC).
The sequence of authors should reect the declining
importance of their contribution, as suggested by previous
authors [46]. Authorship order only reects relative
contribution, whereas evaluation committees often need
quantitative measures. We suggest that the rst author should
get credit for the whole impact (impact factor), the second
author half, the third a third, and so forth, up to rank ten.
When papers have more than ten authors, the contribution of
each author from the tenth position onwards is then valuated
just 5%.
(2) The equal contribution norm (EC). Authors use
alphabetical sequence to acknowledge similar contributions
or to avoid disharmony in collaborating groups. We suggest
that the contribution of each author is valuated as an equal
proportion (impact divided by the number of all authors, but
a minimum of 5%).
(3) The rst-last-author-emphasis norm (FLAE). In
many labs, the great importance of last authorship is well
established. We suggest that the rst author should get credit
of the whole impact, the last author half, and the credit of
the other authors is the impact divided by the number of all
authors [as in (2)].
(4) The percent-contribution-indicated approach
(PCI). There is a trend to detail each authors contribution
(following requests of several journals) [7]. This should also
be used to establish the quantied credit.
The SDC approach (as a new suggestion), the EC norm
(alphabetical order), the FLAE norm, and the PCI approach
may be combined (e.g., FLAE and SDC), but need to be
explicitly mentioned in the acknowledgements.
Our suggestion of explicit indication of the method
applied, including the simple method of weighing authors
0013

January 2007 | Volume 5 | Issue 1 | e18

rank in publications in a quantitative way, will avoid

misinterpretations and arbitrary a posteriori designations
of author contributions. Multidisciplinary scientic
collaboration indeed must be encouraged, but we need to
avoid misinterpretations so that current and future scientic
communities can evaluate author contributions. 

Ecol Soc America 68: 810.

6. Verhagens JV, Wallace KJ, Collins SC, Thomas TR (2003) QUAD system
offers fair shares to all authors. Nature 426: 602.
7. Anderson C (1992) Writers cramp. Nature 355: 101.
8. Laurance WF (2006) Second thoughts on who goes where in author lists.
Nature 442: 26.
9. Weltzien JF, Belote RT, Williams LT, Keller, JF, Engel EC (2006)
Authorship in ecology: Attribution, accountability, and responsibility. Front
Ecol Environm 4: 435441.

Acknowledgments

Citation: Tscharntke T, Hochberg ME, Rand TA, Resh VH, Krauss J (2007) Author
sequence and credit for contributions in multiauthored publications. PLoS Biol 5(1):
e18. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050018

We applied the SDC approach for the sequence of authors. We

are grateful for the stimulating discussions and comments by Jan
Bengtsson, Charles Godfray, Bradford A. Hawkins, Christian Krner,
William F. Laurance, Bernhard Schmid, Wim van der Putten, and
Louise Vet.
Funding. The authors received no specic funding for this article.
Competing interests. The authors have declared that no competing
interests exist.

Copyright: 2007 Tscharntke et al. This is an open-access article distributed under

the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author
and source are credited.
Teja Tscharntke is Professor and Tatyana A. Rand is Postdoc with the Agroecology
Group, University of Gttingen, Gttingen, Germany. Michael E. Hochberg is
Research Director at Centre National de la Recherche Scientique, University of
Montpellier II, Montpellier, France. Vincent H. Resh is Professor at the Department
of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California,
Berkeley, California, United States of America. Jochen Krauss is Postdoc with the
Institute of Environmental Sciences, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, and
the Department of Animal Ecology, Population Ecology, Bayreuth, Germany.

References
1. Regaldo A (1995) Multiauthor papers on the rise. Science 268: 25.
2. Johnson S (2006) Are ecologists becoming more gregarious? Bull British
Ecol Soc 37: 2324.
3. Leash E (1997) Is it time for a new approach to authorship? J Dental Res 76:
724727.
4. Hunt R (1991) Trying an authorship index. Nature 352: 187.
5. Schmidt RH (1987) A worksheet for authorship of scientic articles. Bull

PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ttschar@gwdg.de

0014

January 2007 | Volume 5 | Issue 1 | e18

CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS

435

Authorship in ecology: attribution,

accountability, and responsibility
Jake F Weltzin1*, R Travis Belote2, Leigh T Williams1, Jason K Keller3, and E Cayenne Engel1
Quality and quantity of publications are among the most important measures determining the success of
ecologists. The past 50 years have seen a steady rise in the number of researchers and collaborative manuscripts, and a corresponding increase in multi-authored articles. Despite these increases, there remains a
shortage of useful and definitive guidelines to aid ecologists in addressing authorship issues, leading to a lack
of consistency in what the term author really means. Deciding where to draw the line between those who
have earned authorship and those who are more appropriately credited in the acknowledgments may be one
of the more challenging aspects of authorship. Here, we borrow ideas from other scientific disciplines and
propose a simple solution to help ecologists who are making such decisions. We recommend improving communication between co-authors throughout the research process, and propose that authors publish their contributions to a manuscript in a separate byline.
Front Ecol Environ 2006; 4(8): 435441

rticles published in peer-reviewed journals are the

medium by which scientists present their findings to
the scholarly community. The quality and quantity of publications are essential components for building careers, funding projects, and generating a sense of accomplishment and
self-worth (Lindsey 1980). The past five decades have seen a
proliferation of scientific subdisciplines, an increase in the
number of researchers and collaborative manuscripts, and a
corresponding increase in multi-authored articles (Regalado
1995; Cronin 2001). Multiple authorship is an increasing
trend that has now become the norm, but there remains a
paucity of useful and definitive guidelines to aid researchers
in addressing authorship issues (Rennie et al. 1997; Klein
and Moser-Veillon 1999). Although several journals (eg The
Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, and
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United

In a nutshell:
Ecology is becoming an increasingly collaborative science, with
researchers from various disciplines involved in ecological
research projects; decisions about authorship of a manuscript
are therefore becoming more difficult
The Ecological Society of Americas Code of Ethics provides
only vague guidelines to determine who should be granted
authorship; it is therefore time for ecologists to develop a more
substantial framework for attributing credit to authors
Here, we propose a byline statement summarizing the contribution of each author to the research, to be published with the
article (a practice now commonly used in biomedical journals)

States of America) have adopted clearly defined guidelines

that specify criteria for authorship and communicate that
information to the readers, most journals have only vague or
non-existent guidelines (Rennie et al. 2000).
In the absence of standardized definitions or guidelines on
authorship (eg criteria for author inclusion or order), scientists employ a variety of personal criteria that are unknown
to readers and that probably differ from criteria employed by
other authors, even for articles in the same journal. For
example, individual authors, laboratory groups, or even subdisciplines may determine byline composition and order
based on arbitrary or idiosyncratic traditions, customs, or
habits. As such, the order in which authors are listed communicates little information about the importance of the
contribution of each individual, since a wide variety of
undisclosed methods are used to assign order (Rennie et al.
2000). This can create an environment in which credit,
accountability, and responsibility for research are neither
personally accepted nor publicly acknowledged (Zuckerman
1968). A lack of communication about authorship may
engender interpersonal issues and ethical dilemmas if undeserving individuals are included as authors, or if contributing
researchers are not included (Rennie and Flanagin 1994;
Rennie et al. 1997). The purpose of this article is to discuss
potential approaches to deciding who should be included in
the authorship byline, and in what order. We recommend
improved communication among authors during the writing
process, and outline an approach used by other science disciplines, wherein authors publish their contributions to a
manuscript in a separate byline (eg Panel 1).

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of

Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 *(jweltzin@utk.edu); 2Department
of Biological Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, Blacksburg, VA 20461; 3Smithsonian Environmental
Research Center, Edgewater, MD 21037
The Ecological Society of America

Authorship trends in ecology

Ecologists are in a particularly challenging situation
when dealing with authorship, since our discipline has
www.frontiersinecology.org

Authorship in ecology

436

Panel 1. Author contributions for this article

JFW co-conceived and co-developed the idea for the manuscript, co-refined the intellectual content and scope, edited all
drafts, prepared the final version of the manuscript, and facilitated the gathering of contributors. RTB co-conceived and codeveloped the idea, edited all drafts, and assessed historic trends
in authorship in Ecology. LTW initiated the project, co-developed
and co-refined the intellectual content, and wrote the first two
drafts. JKK co-developed the idea, edited all drafts, and conducted the keyword search. ECE co-developed the idea and
coordinated the authorship survey. JFW is the guarantor for the
integrity of the article as a whole.

developed into a collaborative science which frequently

produces multiple-author articles without simultaneously
developing useful guidelines for handling this issue.
Interdisciplinary teams of scientists are often required to
investigate questions in ecology, and these teams typically include several layers of participants, such as principal investigators, graduate and undergraduate student
researchers, technicians, statisticians, and field assistants.
Increases in the diversity of funding sources, larger laboratories and centers of research, and advances in technology all promote the growth of research teams and networks. This trend is mirrored by patterns of authorship
for articles published in the journal Ecology; between
1925 and 2005, the mean ( 1 SE) number of authors
credited per article tripled from 1.1 0.06 to 3.3 1.1,
and the maximum number of authors on a single paper
increased from 2 to 17 (Figure 1).
Ecological research continues to be increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary, a pattern that is encouraged
by the National Institute for Health and the National
Science Foundation and facilitated by institutions such as
the National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis. Despite this, and the fact that ecological
research continues to move in the direction of large-scale,
long-term projects, ecologists and the majority of their
journals have yet to formally address the authorship issue.
An ISI Web of Knowledge search on the keyword
authorship yields only two matches in the top 20 ecology journals (ranked by impact factor). In contrast, the
same search yields 34 results for the Journal of the American
Medical Association, 13 results for Nature, and 14 for
Science. There were 1090 results when all journals were
included in the search (Thomson ISI 2005). While we
acknowledge that not all search results are relevant to the
topic at hand, this pattern suggests that ecology may be
lagging behind other scientific disciplines when addressing the complexities associated with authorship. The
trend towards increasing author numbers in the absence
of guidelines for acknowledging involvement in projects
will continue to complicate this already sensitive issue.

The meaning of author

The difficulties associated with selecting both who will
become an author on the final manuscript and in what
order those authors should appear are neither trivial nor
www.frontiersinecology.org

JF Weltzin et al.

easily resolved (Panel 2). In the absence of clear guidelines, scientists use individualized criteria, creating a lack
of consistency in what is really meant by the term
author (Rennie et al. 2000). In ecology, it is generally
assumed that the person placed first in the list of authors
contributed the most time and energy to the project, but
how does one compare their relative contributions to the
second, third, or eighth person named? Are all authors
equally responsible for the work presented, and can each
be held accountable for the claims made in the article?
Are certain authors earning undeserved credit for projects, while others are unfairly denied credit for perhaps
greater contributions? There is currently too much disparity between the criteria employed by each set of authors
when submitting a manuscript, allowing researchers to
lose track of who is truly responsible and accountable, and
therefore deserving of credit for the research. This can
also lead to situations where potentially unaccountable
authors (ie those not obliged to accept responsibility for
content) are given credit for the article. This dilutes the
impact of having ones name listed on a manuscript, and
may detract from the professional value of the published
article for the secondary authors who appear as et al.,
rather than having their full name listed in all citations.
The contribution of each author is diminished when
ghost authors, guest contributors, and those who
acquired the initial funding for the project are included
in the list of authors (Rennie and Flanagin 1994). Ghost
authors, ie those who receive author credit for simply
editing completed research, are more often found in the
biomedical sciences, but probably occur in all disciplines.
Guest contributors are invited to participate in manuscript preparation in an undemanding capacity, mainly to
justify the addition of their name to the authorship list
for the positive impact gained from their celebrity in a
given field. Finally, there are all-too-common occurrences of honorary authors, who obtain authorship by
providing funding or lab space, or even by trading
authorship rights on one paper for inclusion on another
(Flanagin et al. 1998). Inclusion of such guest contributors and ghost authors generates ethical questions,
because researchers and co-authors differ in opinion over
the appropriateness of including authors who contributed neither intellectually nor physically to the production of the article (Culliton 1988).
For ecologists, the issue is further complicated when
assessing the contribution of participants, such as technicians and student researchers, who may have been vital
to one portion of a project but not another (Panel 2).
Participants without a PhD may feel as though they have
contributed substantially to the completion of an experiment, but they may have no standards on which to stake
their claim for inclusion on the authorship list (Heffner
1979). Alternatively, investigators may be undecided
about including a technician as an author when that person worked for only a few years on a longer-term project
and meets only some of their criteria for authorship. In
The Ecological Society of America

JF Weltzin et al.

sum, the lack of guidelines leads to an

environment in which individuals
involved in a project are often unsure
about their own right to claim or dispute authorship and provides no means
to resolve situations that arise over the
selection of authors and their order.

Authorship in ecology

437
(a)

Developing authorship

guidelines for ecologists

Scientific journals, professional societies, and individual scientists have previously attempted to create definitions
of authorship and to provide guidelines
on how to determine which participants should be credited on the manu(b)
script. A variety of approaches exist
among the various scientific disciplines,
including listing authors based on
seniority, extent of contribution, importance of contribution, or simply by
alphabetical order or the outcome of a
coin toss (Rennie et al. 1997). However,
these approaches are infrequently communicated to readers, who must make
their own assumptions about how
authors were selected and the order in
which they are listed. Furthermore,
these approaches are often ignored by
the authors who submit manuscripts, so
that even if a journal attempts to proYears
vide a standardized definition of authorship, the scientists may fail to adopt it Figure 1. (a) Mean and (b) maximum number of authors per article published in
Ecology during 1925, 1955, 1985, and 2005. Notes and comments were excluded from
(Klein and Moser-Veillon 1999).
The Ecological Society of America the analysis. Mean ( 1 SE) number of authors with the same capital letter did not differ
(ESA) currently suggests that its mem- (P > 0.05, Tukeys HSD; issues as replicates, thus n = 4, 4, 6, and 12; data were
bers employ a rather vague set of guide- normal).
lines presented in the publication secAlthough these guidelines describe who should be
tion of its Code of Ethics (ESA 2006). Specifically, the
included as an author, they do not address the question of
ESA guidelines related to the selection of authors state:
author order. They also leave interpretation of substantial contribution to the individual(s) making the deci1. Researchers will claim authorship of a paper only
sions, leading to confusion and inequities. The ESA
if they have made a substantial contribution.
guidelines are more lenient than those employed by other
Authorship may legitimately be claimed if
journals, in that authorship may be granted even if only
researchers
one of the four criteria is met. By comparison, the
(a) conceived the ideas or experimental design;
Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to
(b) participated actively in execution of the
Biomedical Journals, developed by the International
study;
Committee of Medical Journal Editors, states that con(c) analyzed and interpreted the data; or
tributors only qualify as authors if they meet all of these
(d) wrote the manuscript.
criteria (ICMJE 2005).
2. Researchers will not add or delete authors from a
Seeking a more definitive approach, Galindo-Leal
manuscript submitted for publication without
(1996) suggested a two-stage process, using a modified
consent of those authors.
scoring system originally proposed by Hunt (1991). The
3. Researchers will not include as co-author(s) any
first stage involves improving communication between
individual who has not agreed to the content of
co-authors by drafting a pre-research agreement for all
the final version of the manuscript.
The Ecological Society of America

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Authorship in ecology

438

JF Weltzin et al.

Panel 2. Authorship survey

We invited attendees of the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America
(Portland, OR) to participate in an informal, voluntary survey about authorship.
Participants were presented with six hypothetical scenarios involving research collaborators, and were asked which characters should be authors, and in what order those
authors should appear on manuscripts. Hardcopies of the surveys were posted on a bulletin board in the main foyer of the conference hall at the meeting; respondents returned
completed surveys onsite, or mailed them at a later date. We received 57 completed
surveys. In Part A below, we present three scenarios from the survey. In Part B, we
include follow-up questions to spur discussion and present highlights of the results from
survey respondents.
Part A
Scenario 1:
Professor X and new graduate student Y
are developing a research project for Y. Y
is interested in a project that Z, a graduate student colleague/professor in the
department, is conducting. Y discusses
project concepts with X, and decides to
conduct a project descended from and
closely related to Zs project. The questions, methods, and analysis were developed solely by X and Y, and all physical
work was conducted by Y. Y and Z met a
few times to discuss methods for analysis, but Z contributed nothing to manuscript preparation.

Part B
Follow-up questions:
Should Z be included as an author?
Who should be first author?

Scenario 2:
Principal Investigator X developed the
intellectual ideas, wrote a proposal, and
received monies for a new, well-funded
project. X hires technician T to handle
project logistics, and to ensure that the
project follows Xs original vision; T collects much of the empirical data, and
supervises undergraduate students who
assist during data collection. Research
assistant A is responsible for manipulation, analysis, and interpretation of data
collected by T et al.

Follow-up question:
Who should be included as an author,
and in what order?

Scenario 3:
Professor X initiates writing of a synthesis paper with graduate student Y on
their favorite topic. After the two meet
several times to outline a paper, Y takes
the task of writing the first draft. X and Y
pass the manuscript back and forth several times before X does the final revision and submits the manuscript for publication.

Follow-up question:
Who should be the first author?

Survey responses:
25% of respondents thought that Z
deserved authorship.
84% of respondents indicated that Y
should be first author, whereas 16% of
respondents indicated that X deserved
to be the first author.

Survey responses:
78% of respondents thought all three
characters should be included as
authors.
78% chose X as first author.
14% chose A as first author.
82% included T as an author.
Respondents listed 10 unique combinations for authorship order.

Survey responses:
46% of respondents thought that X
should be the first author.
46% thought that Y should be the first
author.
8% could not decide.

involved for only a portion of the project or when participants are not asked
to be involved in all aspects of the project. Weighting the various categories,
such as planning or analysis, is difficult because it is often a matter of opinion as to how much credit is earned by
conceiving the project or analyzing the
data relative to credit earned by physically collecting the data. Informal intellectual contributions from technical
staff may go unnoticed or be underappreciated by researchers preparing a
manuscript. The practice of discussing
authorship before, during, and after a
project is surely one that should be
adopted by all scientists to avoid confusion and discord over issues of authorship. However, in our opinion, using
the scoring system may allow too narrow a scope for contemporary projects
in ecology.
Proposals to resolve these challenges
and establish a realistic and functional
set of guidelines for authors should
include a way to recognize both credit
and accountability for the article, while
maintaining flexibility for a diverse set
of research participants, projects, and
situations. These guidelines must be
available to the participants for any
given project, as well as to the readers
of each manuscript, to ensure that the
meaning of the authorship list is communicated to the scientific community.
Standards for determining authorship
order, and for differentiating between
authors and those whose names more
appropriately appear in the acknowledgments, must also be established.

Establishing accountability and

responsibility

parties to use as a guideline or protocol. Co-authors monitor

their involvement and progress throughout the duration of
the research project by using the scoring system, which
assesses their participation in planning, executing, analyzing, interpreting, and writing the manuscript. The second
stage involves reviewing the scoring system and using the
scores to determine who has earned credit as an author; the
authorship order is selected by arranging names in the
descending order of their scores. Although this scoring system may work well for research teams involving few participants, it is less useful for the multi-year, large-scale complex
collaborative projects that are becoming the norm in ecology. Complications may arise when participants are highly
www.frontiersinecology.org

Rennie et al. (1997) proposed a system that stresses the

importance of accepting responsibility and accountability
for research in order to earn credit for it (see also Davis and
Gregerman 1969; Garfield 1983; Moulopoulos et al. 1983;
Huth 1986; Saffran 1989; Mancini 1990; Hunt 1991; and
Green 1994). They propose a system of contributorship
(as opposed to authorship) that recognizes the contribution of each individual to the manuscript, and establishes
the accountability of that person to the content of the
manuscript; in short, the word and concept contributor is
substituted for the word and concept author (Rennie et
al. 1997). Contributors disclose which particular aspects of
a manuscript they were responsible for in a byline that is
The Ecological Society of America

JF Weltzin et al.

published with the article (see, for example, the contributorship byline [Panel 1] for this article). This system
requires each author to publicly accept accountability for
their particular contribution; moreover, it would enable
readers to more objectively ascribe credit to the named
individuals, as well as determining the credibility of the
article as a whole. A contributorship policy was recently
adopted by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America (PNAS 2006), which posts
the byline as a footnote to the paper, albeit only online
(Panel 3). Similarly, authors submitting a manuscript to
Nature are strongly encouraged to include a statement in
the end notes to specify the actual contribution of each coauthor (Nature 2006; see also Anonymous 1999).
Alternatively, journals could establish standards and
consistency for bylines by providing a list of possible tasks
or responsibilities to contributors (Rennie et al. 1997;
Klein and Moser-Veillon 1999; see also Panel 3). That
said, it is probably unnecessary and overly complicated to
attempt to standardize all job descriptions for all research
projects. It is probably more important to create an
opportunity for authors to declare individual contributions, whatever they may be, and to publish them with
the manuscript. Only by disclosing this information can
the contributors guarantee that their relative responsibilities, and thus their relative accountability and credit, are
publicly accepted and acknowledged.
Rennie et al. (1997) advise researchers to meet, discuss, and decide on their respective contributions to the
project, as well as the relative value of the contributions
to the whole, and in what order to list them in publications. As Galindo-Leal (1996) stressed, communicating
with collaborators before, during, and after the project is
an important part of ensuring that responsibility is
accepted and acknowledged, credit is assigned fairly, and
conflicts are avoided (Figure 2).
By committing to ongoing discourse about authorship
throughout a particular project, contributors can make
informed decisions as to individual contributions, which
may facilitate ordering of authors. Authorship order is generally understood to be designated by placing the name of
the persons involved in order of the importance of their
duties, in descending order, starting with the collaborator
who made the most substantial contributions (Rennie et
al. 1997). Since each research team may employ unique
criteria, such as allowing someone to take the last position
on the authorship list for providing funding, it is particularly important that the ordering methodology is disclosed
to the readers (Klein and Moser-Veillon 1999). In sum,
open communication between all participants involved in
a research project can yield the best results for understanding and determining authorship order.

Guarantors and acknowledgees

Although published papers are typically (and appropriately) considered as a whole, complex projects involving
The Ecological Society of America

Authorship in ecology
Panel 3. Guidelines for authorship, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America (PNAS 2006)
Authorship should be limited to those who have contributed
substantially to the work. The corresponding author must have
obtained permission from all authors for the submission of each
version of the paper and for any change in authorship.
All collaborators share some degree of responsibility for any
paper they co-author. Some co-authors have responsibility for
the entire paper as an accurate, verifiable report of the research.
These include co-authors who are accountable for the integrity
of the data reported in the paper, carry out the analysis, write
the manuscript, present major findings at conferences, or provide scientific leadership to junior colleagues. Co-authors who
make specific, limited contributions to a paper are responsible
for their contributions, but may have only limited responsibility
for other results. While not all co-authors may be familiar with
all aspects of the research presented in their paper, all collaborators should have in place an appropriate process for reviewing
the accuracy of the reported results.
Authors must indicate their specific contributions to the published work.This information will be posted online as a footnote
to the paper. Examples of designations include:
Designed research
Performed research
Contributed new reagents or analytic tools
Analyzed data
Wrote the paper
An author may list more than one contribution, and more than
one author may have contributed to the same aspect of the work.

multiple collaborators, each involved in one aspect of the

project, may obscure internal assignment or external perception of accountability and responsibility. Thus, it is
good practice for each research team also to designate at
least one contributor as a guarantor for the whole project
(eg Panel 1). Guarantors are individuals who have contributed substantially to the manuscript and who have
also made an extra effort to ensure the integrity of the
paper as a whole. Guarantors may organize the various
tasks associated with manuscript preparation, ensure the
internal consistency of the final manuscript, and solicit
and organize contributorship statements; as such, they are
prepared to be accountable for all parts of the completed
manuscript, before and after publication (Rennie et al.
1997). Recognizing a guarantor ensures that someone on
the research team accepts and publicly acknowledges
responsibility and accountability for the entire project,
including each component of the manuscript. Guarantors
serve the scientific community by certifying that all work
was done properly and thoroughly, and by guarding
against dishonest scientific practices. Acknowledging a
guarantor improves trust and credibility in science and
promotes good research practices.
Deciding where to draw the line between those who
have earned authorship and those who are more appropriately credited in the acknowledgments may be one of the
more challenging aspects of authorship. One meaningful
way of thinking about the differences between these two
sets of participants may be to consider whether or not the
participant is responsible and accountable for the article.
A contributor receiving credit for the article should be
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439

Authorship in ecology

440

JF Weltzin et al.

Acceptance of a contributorship system

will require behavioral changes on the
part of researchers and technical changes
by journals and professional societies.
Those who argue that a system such as
this would already be in place if it were a
good idea may be comfortable with the
status quo. In fact, as described above, this
system has been used by numerous biomedical journals for some time, and is
being used or considered by top quality
journals that publish ecology papers, such
as PNAS and Nature. It will take effort to
bring about this change, but we argue that
such a modification is necessary in a publishing environment where more and
Figure 2. Intellectual contribution in ecology can be difficult to quantify because field more researchers are likely to experience
technicians or undergraduate students may provide important, informal observations issues related to authorship.
that can easily be under-acknowledged by principal investigators. The informal
contributions may drive future research, direct data analyses, and contribute to
Conclusions
manuscripts. Communication among potential contributors before, during, and after a
project is critical to ensure assignment and acceptance of responsibility. Each contributor Although no system will completely resolve
is responsible for drafting his or her own byline; the guarantor is responsible for the challenges associated with authorship,
evaluating each byline relative to the others, and for maintaining internal consistency.
substituting contributors for authors and
asking that all researchers disclose their reawilling to be held accountable for its contents and not be sons for including authors and their relative order may go a
just responsible for a portion of the work involved. In long way towards ensuring proper credit and appropriate
contrast, an acknowledgee may contribute formal or responsibility for articles. Including this information as a
informal ideas to ongoing projects, collect enormous byline, in addition to a statement of acknowledgments, will
amounts of data, and develop and/or conduct statistical enable readers (as well as contributors) to better understand
analyses, but may not be accountable for the final con- where responsibility, accountability, and credit belong. As
tents of all or even portions of the final manuscript. Open the number and frequency of multi-author papers continues
communication about the roles, responsibilities, and to rise, ignoring authorship issues may dilute the meaning of
expectations for authors as opposed to acknowledgees author. Our ecological journals and professional societies
should be ongoing during the writing process.
should adopt this system, or its equivalent, as a reasonable
response that would provide much needed guidance for all

Will a system of contributorship work for ecology? contemporary researchers and scholars. It is time for ecologists to join the rest of the scientific community in discussing
Critics of similar proposals for contributorship advance sev- authorship issues and developing guidelines for our articles.
eral reasons why these systems may not work (Rennie et al.
1997; Flanagin et al. 1998; Yank and Rennie 1999; Rennie
Acknowledgments
et al. 2000). Skeptics argue that the system of naming contributors and disclosing individual responsibilities is no dif- P Allen contributed to initial discussions of this topic and
ferent than current author and acknowledgment lists. This co-refined the intellectual content of earlier versions of
system is different, however, because it eliminates the arti- the manuscript. C DeVan assisted with data collection
ficial distinction, mostly of a social nature, between authors and organization for Figure 1. The survey on authorship
and non-author contributors that is, between authors and was developed and implemented with the help of M
acknowledgees. The contributions of all (not just those of Fitzpatrick, C Iversen, J Nagel, and L Souza. Comments
acknowledgees) are described and disclosed (Rennie et al. from P Cole, S Collins, O Dermody, M Fitzpatrick, C
1997). Critics also worry that any systematic change would Iversen, C Reilly, N Sanders, and L Souza improved earbe resisted by researchers, but this could be overcome lier versions of the manuscript.
through the leadership of journals, professional societies,
and indexers by requiring that article submissions use the
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system. While no system will put an end to disagreements Anonymous. 1999. Policy on papers contributors. Nature 399: 393.
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dence of a structural shift in scholarly communication practices? J Am Soc Inf Sci Tech 52: 55869.
attenuate problems and abuses of authorship.
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Culliton BJ. 1988. Authorship, data ownership examined. Science
242: 658.
Davis PJ and Gregerman RI. 1969. Parse analysis: a new method for
the evaluation of investigators bibliographies. New Engl J Med
281: 98990.
ESA 2006. Ecological Society of America code of ethics. Adopted
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January 2006.
Flanagin A, Carey LA, Fontanarosa PB, et al. 1998. Prevalence of
articles with honorary authors and ghost authors in peerreviewed medical journals. JAMA 280: 22224.
Galindo-Leal C. 1996. Explicit authorship. B Ecol Soc Am 77:
21920.
Garfield E. 1983. Essays of an information scientist, Vol 5:
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Green MS. 1994. Authorship! Authorship! JAMA 271: 1904.
Heffner AG. 1979. Authorship recognition of subordinates in collaborative research. Soc Stud Sci 9: 37784.
Huth EJ. 1986. Irresponsible authorship and wasteful publication.
Ann Internal Med 104: 25759.
Hunt R. 1991. Trying an authorship index. Nature 352: 187.
ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors).
2005. Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals: writing and editing for biomedical publication. www.icmje.org/index.html. Viewed 7 December 2005.
Klein CJ and Moser-Veillon PB. 1999. Authorship: can you claim a
byline? J Am Diet Assoc 99: 7779.
Lindsey D. 1980. Production and citation measures in the sociology
of science: the problem of multiple authorship. Soc Stud Sci 10:
14562.

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Mancini GBJ. 1990. Documenting contributions to authorship.
Ann Internal Med 104: 25759.
Moulopoulos SD, Sideris DA, and Georgilis KA. 1983. Individual
contributions to multiauthor papers. Brit Med J 287:
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Regalado A. 1995. Multiauthor papers on the rise. Science 268: 25.
Rennie D and Flanagin A. 1994. Authorship! Authorship!
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Rennie D, Yank V, and Emanuel L. 1997. When authorship fails: a
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Rennie D, Flanagin A, and Yank V. 2000. The contributions of
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441

EDITORIAL
Multiple Authors, Multiple Problems
he average number of authors on scientific papers is skyrocketing. Thats partly because
labs are bigger, problems are more complicated, and more different subspecialties are
needed. But its also because U.S. government agencies like the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) have started to promote team science. As physics developed in the
postWorld War II era, federal funds built expensive national facilities, and these served
as surfaces on which collaborations could crystallize naturally. That has produced some
splendid results. Multidisciplinary teams have been slower to develop in biology, but now the rush is
on. NIH recently sponsored a meeting entitled Catalyzing Team Sciencesomething new for an
agency traditionally wedded to the investigator-initiated small-project kind of science. Increasingly
complex problems, NIH seems to be saying, will require larger and more diversely
specialized groups of investigators. So team science is part of its road map: a Good
Thing. That may be right.
Multiple authorship thoughhowever good it may be in other wayspresents
problems for journals and for the institutions in which these authors work. For the
A team is
journals, long lists of authors are hard to deal with in themselves. But those long
lists give rise to more serious questions when something goes wrong with the paa team, and
per. If there is research misconduct, should the liability be joint and several, accruing to all authors? If not, then how should it be allocated among them? If there
the members
is an honest mistake in one part of the work but not in others, how should an evaluator aim his or her critique? Such questions plagued the committee that examined
should share
the recent high-profile case of fraud in the physics community, the Schn affair,
and surely will trouble others.
the credit or
When penalties for research misconduct are considered, it is often argued that
an identification of each authors role in the research should be required, in order
the blame.
to help us fix blame. Critics of the notion that authors should share the blame ask,
for example, how can the molecular biologist be expected to certify the honesty
and quality of the crystallographers work? Some would answer by knowing that
person well enough to rely on him or her. I rather like that response, so with respect to assigning blame for research misconduct, I take the joint and several position, knowing
that it puts me in a quirky minority.
Various practical or impractical suggestions have emerged during the longstanding debate on this
issue. One is that each author should provide, and the journal should then publish, an account of that
authors particular contribution to the work. Although Science will make it possible for authors to
do that, we cannot monitor the authors designations or negotiate possible disputes over which author actually did what (theres enough of that already, thank you). And listing the individual contributions of each of a couple of dozen authors will, even if it appears only electronically, add some
length and complexity to the communication.
But a different view of the problem, and perhaps of the solution, comes as we get to university
committees on appointments and promotions, which is where the authorship rubber really meets the
road. Half a lifetime of involvement with this process has taught me how much authorship matters.
I have watched committees attempting to decode sequences of names (is it good or bad that her major professors name wasnt at the end of the author roster?), agonize over whether a much-cited paper was really the candidates work or a coauthors, and send back recommendations asking for more
specificity about the division of responsibility.
Problems of this kind change the argument, supporting the case for asking authors to define their
own roles. After all, if quality judgments about individuals are to be made on the basis of their personal contributions, then the judges better know what they did. But if questions arise about the validity of the work as a whole, whether as challenges to its conduct or as evaluations of its influence
in the field, a team is a team, and the members should share the credit or the blame. Thus, Science
would be glad to see authors define their rolesbriefly, please!but has no plans to pass out the
Newcomb Cleveland prize, our annual award for the best Science paper, in little bits and pieces.

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Donald Kennedy
Editor-in-Chief

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LETTERS

MICHAEL N. NITABACH
Department of Biology, New York University, 100
Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003, USA.
E-mail: mnitabach@acedsl.com

Response
NITABACH RAISES THE IMPORTANT ISSUE OF
how to ensure that CSN presents a fair and
unbiased view of scientific issues. One
cornerstone of avoiding bias on CSN would
be a scientific advisory board with stellar
credentials (already being formed) that
could provide advice about programming.

Scientific societies would also be a source of

advice and support. Many scientific societies
have media outreach programs that include
taped lectures, interviews, and press conferences, and CSN could serve as a central nexus
for all of these efforts, disseminating them to
a wider audience. It will be essential to
present a balanced view of both sides of
controversial issues. We see this more as an
opportunity to engage the audience with a
lively debate.
Nitabach is not quite correct when he says
that C-SPANs goalto broadcast official
governmental proceedings and statements
is an easy one to achieve from a programming
perspective. C-SPANs mission statement (1)
talks of providing access to governmental
proceedings with a balanced presentation of
points of view; of providing a forum for
people who influence public policy without
filtering or otherwise distorting their points of
view; of providing access, through call-in
programs, to decision-makers; and of
employing production values that accurately
convey the business of government rather
than distract from it. Substitute science for
government, and you have CSN.
Broadcasting governmental proceedings is
only a part of C-SPANs schedule. The network
also carries a broad spectrum of nongovern-

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mental meetings, book readings, history, and

advocacy lectures (clearly identified). C-SPAN
strives to be an honest broker in allocating airtime. CSN would do the same.
TERRENCE J. SEJNOWSKI1 AND ROGER BINGHAM2
Hughes Medical Institute, Salk Institute
for Biological Studies, 10010 N. Torrey Pines Road,
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. E-mail: terry@salk.edu.
2Center for Brain and Cognition, Department of
Psychology, University of California, San Diego,
9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 920930109, USA.
E-mail: rsbingham@psy.ucsd.edu

1Howard

Reference
1. S. Frantzich, J. J. Sullivan, The C-SPAN Revolution (Univ.
of Oklahoma Press, Tulsa, OK, 1996), p. 2.

A Suggestion for the

Multiple Author Issue
DONALD KENNEDYS SUPERB AND LONGoverdue Editorial Multiple authors,
multiple problems (8 Aug., p. 733) raises
the increasing problem of too many authors
on scientific papers. This is clearly a case of
dilution of importancehow is one to
appreciate the importance of an author of a
paper with more than 50 coauthors?
I would like to propose a possible solution
that should clarify this issue while allowing
recognition of important technical contribu-

3 OCTOBER 2003

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Ph.D. in a relevant field, but who works

under the auspices of a lobbying organization, be considered worthy of appearing on
CSN? What reasoned standard would
exclude this expert, but not a scientist with
similar academic credentials who works at a
university? And what about scientists who
work at unbiased institutions, but who
receive funding from biased sources?
I think that a CSN could be a valuable addition to the sources of scientific information
currently available to the public, to legislators,
and to administrative officials, but it is going
to be very difficultif not impossibleto
distinguish biased from unbiased sources
of information on the brief time scale required
for 24-7 television programming.

55

tions. Only those individuals who were intimately involved in (i) experimental design,
(ii) data acquisition, (iii) data analysis and
interpretation, and (iv) writing and editing
should be listed as authors. Technical contributions (e.g., a specific measurement) could
be acknowledged as a separate list identifying
the specifics. This could be done in a small
font so that space requirements are minimized. Those listed for technical contributions could cite this in their CV under a separate category, thus getting credit for promotion, tenure, and grant applications.
It is important to note that in addition to
giving credit where credit is due, this would
protect coauthors from any guilt by association if scientific misconduct was discovered
in parts of the publication not related to a
specific contribution.
HERSHEL RAFF
St. Lukes Medical Center, Medical College of
Wisconsin, 2801 West KK River Parkway, Suite 245,
Milwaukee,WI 53215, USA. E-mail: hraff@mcw.edu

A Heterozygote
Advantage
THE EVIDENCE FOR BALANCING SELECTION AT
the prion protein gene (PRNP) due to kuru in

the Fore group of the Papua New Guinea

Highlands is compelling (Balancing selection at the prion protein gene consistent with
prehistoric kurulike epidemics, S. Mead et
al., Reports, 25 April, p. 640). That is, their
analysis of worldwide haplotype diversity
and sequence analysis demonstrates that the
major alleles at the PRNP locus are maintained by selective factors favoring the maintenance of heterozygotes. In addition, the
extent of the heterozygote advantage in the
Fore in terms of their viability in the present
generation can be calculated from Mead et
al.s genotypic data (provided by S. Mead).
In 30 women over the age of 50 that had a
history of multiple exposures to mortuary
feasts, 4 were homozygous MM, 23 were
heterozygous MV, and 3 were homozygous
VV (M and V indicate methonine and valine
at position 129), a large deviation from
Hardy-Weinberg proportions. In another
sample of unexposed Fore individuals, the
genotypes were in Hardy-Weinberg proportions (31 MM, 72 MV, and 37 VV). Using
these two groups as the frequencies of the
genotypes after (indicated by primes below)
and before selection, the viability of genotype
MM relative to genotype MV can be estimated
(1) as VMM = (PMMPMV)/(PMVPMM) =
(0.133)(0.514)/(0.767)(0.221) = 0.403, and

www.sciencemag.org

the viability of genotype VV relative to genotype MV can be estimated as VVV =

(PVVPMV)/(PMVPVV) = (0.100)(0.514)/
(0.767)(0.264) = 0.254. In other words, the
relative viabilities of the genotypes MM, MV,
and VV are 0.403, 1.0, and 0.254, respectively,
a very strong heterozygote advantage in the
face of kuru.
Because adult males participated little
at feasts, this heterozygote advantage acts
primarily in females. Therefore, the
average selection coefficient (s = 1 V)
against MM homozygotes is approximately
s- MM = (1 VMM)/2 = 0.299, and against VV
homozygotes, it is s- VV = (1 VVV) /2 =
0.373. The expected equilibrium frequency
of the V allele is therefore qV = s- MM/(s- MM +
s- VV) = 0.45, not very different from the
observed frequency of 0.55. Although it is
not known whether selection has been this
strong in previous generations, the strength
of balancing selection in this one generation appears to be the strongest yet documented in any human population.
PHILIP W. HEDRICK
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University,
Tempe,AZ 85287, USA. E-mail: philip.hedrick @asu.edu
Reference
1. P. W. Hedrick, Genetics of Populations (Jones &
Bartlett, Boston, ed. 2, 2000).

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LETTERS

57

COMMENTARY
A place of life

Toward perfect ceramics

Transforming light control

378

383

384

LETTERS I BOOKS I POLICY FORUM I EDUCATION FORUM I PERSPECTIVES

LETTERS
edited by Jennifer Sills

FIFTY YEARS AGO IN SCIENCE, D. MCCONNELL ARGUED THAT FOR

anything short of a monographic treatment, the indication of more than
three authors is not justifiable (1). He was never cited. Coauthor numbers kept rising, and it has been recently suggested that in some fields
multiple authorship endangers the author credit system (2). In 2006,
more than 100 papers had over 500
coauthors, and one physics paper had
a record 2512 coauthors (3). With
research groups growing larger (4),
this trend will continue. Given the
increasing interest in the quantification and standardization of scientific
impact with various metrics like the
h index (5, 6) and the growing debate
on potential biases (7, 8) and unethical
behavior (4, 9, 10), a standardized
method to quantify coauthor contributions is needed (1013).
Rarely do all coauthors contribute
to a paper equally. However, academic search engines (such as Google
Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science)
calculate citations, h indices, and rankings without regard to author rank.

CREDIT: JOE SUTLIFF

Biofuels: Clarifying
Assumptions
THE REPORT BY T. SEARCHINGER ET AL.
(Use of U.S. croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions
from land-use change, 29 February, p. 1238)
provides one scenario for the conversion
from a fossil-based energy economy to a biobased, renewable-energy economy. However,
Searchinger et al. failed to include several
important considerations.
It is inaccurate and misleading to allocate
the cutting down of Brazilian rainforest,
which is done often for timber production, to
biofuels use. The economic signals driving
biofuels or agricultural land-use changes are

Quantification of coauthor contributions will motivate coauthors to

clarify each persons percent of contribution.
I propose that the k th ranked coauthor be considered to contribute
1/k as much as the first author. This way, coauthorscontributions can be
standardized to sum to one, regardless of the author number or how
authors are ranked. Author rank can be different from author order, provided that this is declared in the paper. Multiple authors can have the
same rank, as long as this is stated and is reflected in the calculations.
Quantifying coauthorscontributions will encourage a healthy dialogue about the meaning of coauthorship and author rank (2, 4, 10,
13), will promote better consideration of author rank in assessing scientific impact, and will lead to improved ways to measure and report
coauthor contributions.
CAGAN H. SEKERCIOGLU
Department of Biology, Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
94305, USA. E-mail: cagan@stanford.edu

References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

D. McConnell, Science 128, 1157 (1958).

M. Greene, Nature 450, 1165 (2007).
C. King, Sci. Watch 18, 1 (2007).
P. A. Lawrence, Curr. Biol. 17, R583 (2007).
J. E. Hirsch, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104, 19193 (2007).
P. Ball, Nature 448, 737 (2007).
C. D. Kelly, M. D. Jennions, Nature 449, 403 (2007).
D. C. Mishra, Nature 451, 244 (2008).
P. A. Todd, R. J. Ladle, Nature 451, 244 (2008).
D. Kennedy, Science 301, 733 (2003).
R. Hunt, Nature 352, 187 (1991).
J. V. Verhagen, K. J. Wallace, S. C. Collins, T. R. Scott, Nature 426, 602 (2003).
W. F. Laurance, Nature 442, 26 (2006).

different from the timber-driven economic

signals driving land-use change patterns. The
deforestation estimates of Searchinger et al.
are appropriate for biodiesel production in the
Far East. A cheaper and more likely use of
land for increased biofuels production is the 6
billion acres of underutilized or unused rainfed agriculture land available, according to a
Food and Agriculture Organization report (1).
Searchinger et al. analyze switchgrass as
an energy crop when miscanthus and sorghum
have much higher yields [a recent study estimated that miscanthus yields are 250% that
of switchgrass (2)] and would dramatically
reduce the demand for land. Furthermore, because these crops have not been optimized for
biomass, they are likely to produce substantial
further yield increases per acre. Given the the-

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oretical maximum yield of 40 to 50 tons per

acre in a region with an average of 40 inches of
rain, practical yields of 50 to 60% of this maximum are likely. It has even been suggested
that maximum theoretical yield values will be
reached and possibly surpassed (3).
Searchinger et al. assume that crops grown
in developing countries will have lower yields.
The yields are lower because of low prices and
lack of farmer income. In these conditions,
farmers cannot afford the best seed crops and
other inputs such as fertilizer (1). It is likely
that if farmer incomes improve, yields will
also increase.
Searchinger et al. state that [h]igher
prices triggered by biofuels will accelerate
forest and grassland conversion there even if
surplus croplands exist elsewhere. Energy

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