Meeting of Working Group on HEP Authorship, Tuesday, January, 11, 2005
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On the Phone: Hiro Aihara, Dmitri Denisov, Lorenzo. Foa, Gregor Herten,
Max Klein, Taku Yananaka,
At CERN: Hans-Ake Gustafsen, Vera Luth, Steinar Stapnes, Pippa Wells,
We apologize for the high level of noise and poor acoustics of the meeting room at CERN.
Most of the material is posted in various hypernews messages, the missing pieces will follow later today, though we hope to some updates prior to the next meeting.
1) HEP publications records of past and current experiments
OPAL:
Pippa reported on OPAL's publication record over 15 years,
distinguishing between 400 physics results in journals signed by
all 350 authors, and circa 100 paper signed by
selected authors on technical topics or special physics results
and analysis techniques.
In addition, there -have been about 700 talks at conferences,
of which about 500 were published and signed by the speaker on
behalf of the collaboration, as appropriate.
Authorlists are alphabetical.
H1:
Max reported a similar record for H1, averaging 15 physics papers/year
Authorlists are alphabetical.
CDF:
Daniel Whiteson provided a summary (in form of a graph) for CDF, some
400 authors, typically 20 journal publications per year plus about
3-5 technical papers per year.
Authorlists are alphabetical.
BABAR:
Jacques is preparing a similar statistics fro BABAR, a collaboration
of more than 500 members, with as many as 70 contributed papers to
ICHEP04. All authorlists are alphabetical.
Belle:
Hiro recalled Belle's practice of sign-up for individual publications
with the option of three primary authors in non-alphabetical order.
Now only 10 f the Belle papers have Abe as first author!
Hiro will try to prepare a graph showing the number of
publications/author.
2) Publication practices in other fields
Dimitri reported from LIGO and SLOAN:
LIGO has 400 scientists and engineers from 41 institutions, all
of them have signed the first 8 papers,
technical papers are signed by smaller groups.
SLOAN is a collaboration of 14 universities and has about 200 members.
So far, 100 papers, typical authorlist is 30-50, primarily subgroups
with similar physics interests.
Authorlist in non-alphabetical.
3) Discussion of Current Practices and potential variations
Taku analyzed the meaning of authorship both to the collaborators
a) contribution to the results
b) responsibility for the results
and to the outside
c) promotion of the best young scientists
d) recognition among peers and in other fields of physics
Proposal:
a) emphasize principal contributors
b) provide electronic reference to whole collaboration
c) publish more technical information on calibration, reconstruction,
simulation, statistical techniques, .... This information is critical
for the understanding of physics results, and often is missing.
Vera discussed an idea on how to make authorlists more meaningful:
a) divide the collaboration into sub-collaborations along various physics topics under study. These subgroups should include scientists who provide technical support, provide advice through reviews, and in other ways have significantly contributed
b) with 10-15 subgroups authorship would shrink to less than 50 scientists
c) list should be non-alphabetical, with primary analysts, students and postdocs first, thus preventing all authorlists to start with Abe.
This would have many advantages, the problem will be acceptance and honest evaluation by individuals of their contribution.
Daniel submitted a presentation, underlining the need for change, but cautioning about too radical a change. He recommends that this working group be prepared to perform a survey, asking our colleagues to evaluate potential proposals for change.
Steinar summarized many of the points motivating the formation of this working group.
4) Homework for future meetings:
A. Add to the surveys of past and current HEP collaborations:
1) total number of collaborators and institutions
2) estimate of number of conference talks and write-ups
3) number of seminars/colloquia
4) specify number of years over which publications extend
Complete records for BABAR (Jacques), Belle(Hiro), CDF
numbers(Daniel), H1(Max)
B. Practices in other fields
Try to get similar information for other fields
(in addition to LIGO and SLOAN)
Genetics (Vera, Pippa)
Astronomy (Dmitri)
C. Other ideas for changes
D. Impact of reduced authorlists
Can I call on Lorenzo Foa, Taku Yamanaka, Steinar Stapnes to develop some
discussion points?
Also, more thought need to be given to the process of bringing
an LHC physics analysis to publication. Like Higgs searches!
Also, Daniel is thinking on how to possibly develop a questionnaire
to get our colleagues' reactions to various proposals. Should this
be initiated by the collaborations? Or can this group initiate this?
5) Future Meetings
Proposed periods for future meetings
(please let me know which days you cannot attend)
Feb. 7-10
March 7-10
There is also a desire expressed to meet in person some time
somewhere to discuss in more detail and draft the report we might
want to prepare.
On my schedule are two meetings in March in California:
March 14-17 UCSD CKM Workshop
March 18-22 SLAC ILC Workshop
I may also be in Europe for a BABAR Collab. Mtg on Elba, May 22-26,
and thus could visit CERN before or after. I might also be at CERN
sometime in early June.
In the US a good place to meet might be Fermilab. I am not aware
of any meetings there, but April is free for me.
Please let me know what your plans or constraints are.
Clearly we need to make sure that for future phone conferences
we have quiet rooms.
Also, it is important to have the material that is being presented
available on a computer or projector. So, I will post the agenda,
after you left me know in advance what you would like to present.
The remainder of the material from the January meeting will be posted
tomorrow, my link to UNIX is down at this time.
Thank you all for your contributions and thought on this thorny subject.
Ciao
Vera
Remember, we have set-up a hypernews for these meetings: The url is: http://hypernews.slac.stanford.edu/HyperNews/slacsite/get/C11Authorship.html
The e-mail address for the hypernews is: C11Authorship-ss@slac.stanford.edu
==============================================
Vera G. Luth
SLAC MS 95
P.O. Box 20450
Stanford, CA 94309
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C11 WG on Authorship in Large HEP Collaborations 
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