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None Genome publication strategy 

Forum: C11 Authorship
Date: 24 Jan, 2005
From: Pippa Wells <pippa@mail.cern.ch>

Reply to a general inquiry. I have also sent a followup question which I 
will forward too.

Pippa.

-- 
   +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
      Pippa Wells, Div EP, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland.
      Telephone 78179 or 73839 (External +41 22 76 78179 or 73839)
   +---------------------------------------------------------------------+

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:56:15 +0000
From: Gos Micklem <gos@gen.cam.ac.uk>
To: Pippa Wells <Pippa.Wells@cern.ch>
Cc: Andy Parker <parker@hep.phy.cam.ac.uk>, Gos Micklem <gos@gen.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: genome publications

Hi Pippa,

Practice is varied and there have been a number of mishaps.  For
really big publications (the human genome - >2500 authors) the full
publication list was in an online supplement to the paper and a few
100 chosen few were listed in the print publication.  The way this
publication was cited in PubMed (the definitive list of biomedical
publications www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) was "Lander et al", as Eric
Lander happened to be the first author, within the first group listed
as collaborating.  Apparently this annoyed a lot of people as the
citation was supposed to be "The Human Genome Sequencing Consortium"
but somehow Nature failed to pass this on to PubMed who won't change
it unless the journal re-submits which they haven't.  Another
annoyance for the 2000 extra authors on the full author list is that
Nature didn't pass that on to PubMed either.  This means that if one
of those authors cites the paper as a publication and a prospective
employer checks on PubMed it will seem that they are not an author.

So - it would be good to be clear on all sides that when a consortium
is planned as being the "author" that this is dealt with consistently.

> >I'm involved in a committee established by IUPAP to discuss the  
> >authorship
> >policy of the large HEP collaborations, and how to improve the  
> >recognition
> >of who did what within the collaboration and for a particular paper.  

Who did what is obviously a tricky one when large numbers are
involved.  The best thing to do is probably to explain what each team
did, rather than each individual.  The recently-established, highly
regarded open access journal PLoS Biology is among the first in the
biomedical sciences to include a paragraph giving an author by author
account of their contributions.  Authorship battles (who is first,
last, corresponding author) are very common in the biosciences and I
imagine that this new practice will introduce a new level of battling.
I'm not sure what they will do if a paper is submitted with a very
large number of authors: probably they will attribute by group.

> >One
> >thing the committee wants to do is survey current practice in other
> >disciplines with large collaborations. I volunteered to try and find  
> >out
> >what the current practice is for papers in the field of genetics/human
> >genome, and was wondering if one of you had a college colleague  
> >involved
> >in the Sanger Institute who could give me a short summary of how they  
> >deal
> >with publications, especially who signs (main authors, large  
> >teams.....?)

I'm not sure what you mean by "who signs" - do you mean who signs off
on the draft?  This can be done in a hierarchical way - the team
leaders being responsible for signing after appropriate consultation
within their teams.

If you mean who is cited as an author I think that anyone who has
contributed substantially should be an author and it is quite wrong
for only the group leaders to be cited "because there would be too
many authors otherwise".  The names and affiliations of ~2000 authors
will only be around 100,000 characters which is tiny amount in these
days of electronic publication.  There is something to be said for
very large multi-team publications being cited as a consortium listing
just the collaborating institutes, with the details of all those
involved listed elsewhere.  What is bad practice is to have a two-tier
system with those who happened to be around at the right time gaining
a "proper" citation and others not.

Hope this helps - let me know if you have further questions,

Gos


-- 
Gos Micklem PhD              g.micklem@gen.cam.ac.uk
Department of Genetics/ Department of Applied Maths, Cambridge University
Tel : +44 (0) 1223 765 281
Fax : +44 (0) 1223 333 992
www.ccbi.cam.ac.uk   www.flychip.org.uk   www.flymine.org
www.gen.cam.ac.uk/newdept/research/labs/micklem.htm

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