OPTIMIZING THE SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOR: ENCOURAGE RESEARCH INTEGRITY

1. OPTIMIZING THE SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOR: ENCOURAGE RESEARCH INTEGRITY Eugen Tarnow Avalon Business Systems, Inc. etarnow@avabiz.com www.avabiz.com Riverdale, NY

2. ME S.B. and Ph.D. in Physics (M.I.T. ‘83 and ‘89) Postdoc at Xerox PARC and Los Alamos National Labs 23 publications in physics then interdisciplinary research "Like Water and Vapor--Conformity and Independence in the Large Group," Behavioral Science "The Authority Relation in the Airplane Cockpit and the Concept of Obedience Optimization,” (chapter in coming LEA book on Milgram) “A Recipe for Mission and Vision Statements”, Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science “The Authorship List in Science: Junior Physicists’ Perceptions of Who Appears and Why,” Science and Engineering Ethics, APS News, Nature, AAAS Professional Ethics Report, Salon Magazine, and perhaps The Scientist Owner of a small software business

3. CONTENTS Why ethical authorship is important Potential situation of a physics postdoc Previous work Survey of physics postdocs authorship APS ethical statement Quantify inappropriate authorship according to APS ethical statement Communication between postdoc and boss about authorship criteria Institutional response Views of senior scientists How to improve the process of assigning authorship ORI proposal

4. ASSIGNING AUTHORSHIP - WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? An efficient market of scientific intellectual property A great incentive and organizational catalyst - public demonstration of intellectual achievement and ownership Basis for who gets to decide what science will be done and who will do it Trust from authorship integrity enables free flow of information

5. ASSIGNING AUTHORSHIP - WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? Thanks for responding. The reason the public should be interested in it is that when credit is not given when due, the scientific endeavor becomes a less efficient market for ideas and their tax money will then be spent in a less efficient way. An efficient market for ideas should include a clear statement for who did what in research papers, and, alternatively, a clear statement as to who should be on the byline. Currently, with the exception of biology, there is no such authorship statement in any science and, including biology, there is a considerable amount of honorary authorship.

6. A CONFUSING SITUATION 1998 Nobel Prize for the fractional quantum Hall effect. Two papers, an experimental paper with three authors and a theoretical with one author The crystal grower, the third author on the first paper, Art Gossard, got the American Physical Society Buckley prize but not the Nobel Only political insiders in the field know what it means

7. POTENTIAL SITUATION THAT MIGHT BE TROUBLING TO A JUNIOR SCIENTIST Potential postdoc situation During the manuscript review, the question of authorship comes up Postdoc finds her or his authorship diluted and questions the authorship assignment Is there a standard? - Typically nothing in writing. Ask friends Can’t ask higher-ups What would be the consequences of removing extraneous authors, including boss?

8. POTENTIAL SITUATION THAT MIGHT BE TROUBLING TO A JUNIOR SCIENTISTCONT’D There isn’t much the postdoc can do!

9. PREVIOUS WORK Vasta (1981) in psychology Swazey, Anderson and Lewis (1993) science graduate students and faculty Kalichman and Friedman (1992) medical postdocs Eastwood, Derish, Leash, and Ordway (1996) medical postdocs

10. PREVIOUS WORK - VASTA (1981) Junior and senior members of the APA with PhD at research universities 28% has been involved in a situation in which their authorship was not commensurate with their input Ethical guidelines not specific and not used 21% considered honorary authorship reasonable (not correlated with professional age) Seeming division of respondents - those who care and those who don’t J. Supp. Abstract Serv. Cat. Of Selected Docs. In Psych!

11. PREVIOUS WORK - VASTA (1981)

12. PREVIOUS WORK - VASTA (1981)

13. PREVIOUS WORK - VASTA (1981)

14. PREVIOUS WORK - VASTA (1981)

15. PREVIOUS WORK - SWAZEY, ANDERSON AND LEWIS (1993) University profs and grad students in 4 fields Exposure to ethical misconduct within the last five years Inappropriate authorship perpetrated by faculty as common as plagiarism by students Student reports on faculty misappropriation of authorship are similar to faculty reports on faculty misappropriation of authorship Initial obscure publication?

16. PREVIOUS WORK - KALICHMAN AND FRIEDMAN (1992) & EASTWOOD, DERISH, LEASH AND ORDWAY (1996) Medical postdocs at UCSF (66% PhDs and the rest MDs and PharmDs) Fewer than half familiar with any university, school, laboratory or departmental guidelines for research and publication Nearly half believed being head of the lab warrants authorship and slightly fewer believed obtaining funds warrants authorship (in direct opposition to “Uniform Requirement for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals”) Tendency to award honorary authorship also correlated with exposure to honorary authorship or unfairly denied authorship

17. PREVIOUS WORK - EDLO: SOLVE PROBLEM WITH ETHICS COURSE? 18% had had course in research ethics Ethics course participation correlated with belief of changed behavior but not actual change in behavior Ethics course correlated positively with tendency to award honorary authorship

18. PROBABLY CANNOT SOLVE PROBLEM WITH ETHICS COURSE: WHEN THE PUSH COMES TO SHOVE Fundamental ethics experiment: Stanley Milgram’s electrical shock experiment. Extreme experiment asks subjects to administer larger and larger electrical shocks until they “kill” the subject or the subject becomes “unconscious.” The subjects’ ethics training (“though shalt not kill”) was of no use. The pressure of the situation overwhelmed.

19. WHAT MY SURVEY IS ABOUT Knowledge of specific community-wide ethical guidelines Interpretation of ethical guidelines Precise count of inappropriate authorship How much communication takes place in the authorship assignment process? Institutional response

20. THE UPSHOT WILL BE: Assignment of authorship is not a well defined process Little communication takes place between postdoc and boss A substantial amount of inappropriate authorship exists

21. METHOD Questionnaire Two samples (191 postdocs in total) A national laboratory (with call-backs) AIP mailing list of university postdocs (no call-backs) 53% overall return rate

22. APS GUIDELINES FOR PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT: STATEMENT ON AUTHORSHIP “Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the concept, design, execution and interpretation of the research study.”

23. BIOMEDICAL JOURNAL EDITORS STATEMENT ON AUTHORSHIP IS BETTER ... “Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to (a) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; (b) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on (c) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions (a), (b), and (c) must all be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is also not sufficient for authorship … Editors may require authors to justify the assignment of authorship”

24. IN PHYSICS ASSIGNMENT OF AUTHORSHIP IS NOT WELL DEFINED Most postdocs (74%) do not recall seeing APS authorship statement Half believe that obtaining funding warrants authorship according to the APS authorship statement Statement does not specify significant intellectual contribution In opposition to biomedical editors Most postdocs and supervisors (60-70%) do not agree on authorship criteria Most postdocs and supervisors (75% of all relationships) do not discuss authorship criteria

25. WHY NO DISCUSSION WITH SUPERVISOR? TOO IMPORTANT TO CAREER Your publications: 4.2 Supervisor recommendation letters: 4.1 Prestige and influence from supervisor: 3.5 Learning from supervisor: 3.5

26. IN PHYSICS INAPPROPRIATE AUTHORSHIP IS COMMON Half of all postdocs had at least one paper with an inappropriate author in their current position

27. PARTICULARS OF INAPPROPRIATE AUTHORSHIP I Very few postdocs write single-authored paper The supervisor was an author on 92% of all the postdocs’ papers On 14% of papers, the supervisor was listed inappropriately. On 1% of papers, the postdoc was an inappropriate author On 33% of all papers with authors in addition to the supervisor and the postdoc, one or more of those authors was listed inappropriately

28. PARTICULARS OF INAPPROPRIATE AUTHORSHIP II Reasons for inappropriate authorship: Relationship building Minor contributions Previous or expected contributions Crediting staff that are close in a social sense

29. INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE Survey sponsorship turned down by 3 APS committees, in particular the Publications Oversight Committee with the chief editor in charge. Postdoc with elected APS position told me that the present study was “offensive,” a “hot issue” and that he feared “isolating himself” should he bring it up in an APS committee meeting. One high-up APS official told me: allocation of authorship was not a problem: the person guessed that only a minority of perhaps ten percent of supervisors would misappropriate authorship. The person also stated that a study of authorship issues was “nobody’s highest priority with the exception of postdocs” who he said “tend sometimes to be an underclass” and therefore would not have the political clout needed to bring up the issue. Another high-up APS official told me that once you obtain a high level position it becomes easy to just go with the flow, explaining to me why it was hard to get sponsorship. AIP turned down sponsorship informally NSF turned down sponsorship of post-survey work (evaluations were 2 for poor, 2 for fair, 2 for good, 2 for very good)

30. INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE American Scientist sat on it for a long time Once published in SEE, republished by American Physical Society News, Nature, AAAS Professional Ethics Report (coming), The Scientist (probably coming) Gave paper and interview to Physics Today for ethical misconduct article. PT instead quoted senior physicist saying “there is no statistics on misconduct in physics.” Excluded from What’s New

31. COMMUNITY INTEREST IN HONORARY AUTHORSHIP 0.006% of all research articles in MEDLINE are about authorship, the “currency” in science - compare this with the number of articles we face every day about our regular currency - money Most are letters to and from editors The number of web pages on honorary authorship is minimal - only 75 on Altavista to be compared with 47,000 pages on plagiarism MIT web page: 4/126 ratio, no policy Harvard web page : 3/87 ratio, policy only in HSPH NSF web page: 0/4 ratio

32. COMMUNITY INTEREST IN HONORARY AUTHORSHIP Honorary authorship not part of the Fabrication, Falsification, Plagiarism paradigm of the NAS Commission on Scientific Integrity did not touch upon assignment of authorship (ORI has an interest in, but does not accept, authorship disputes) Biomedical journal editors an exception

33. INSTITUTIONAL INTEREST NAS writes in “On Being a Scientist” (1989): …If a senior researcher has defined and put a project into motion and a junior researcher is invited to join in, major credit may go to the senior researcher, even if at the moment of discovery the senior researcher is not present …Decisions about how credit is to be allotted for ... Contributions are far from easy and require serious thought and collegial discussion. If in doubt about the distribution of credit, a researcher must talk frankly with others, including the senior scientist. …Plagiarism is the most blatant from of misappropriation of credit [me: the most blatant form of plagiarism is honorary authorship] …”Honorary authors” dilute the credit due to the people who actually did the work, and make the proper attribution of credit more difficult. Some scientific journals now state that a person should be listed as the author of a paper only if that person made a direct and substantial contribution to the paper. Of course, such terms as “direct” and “substantial” are themselves open to interpretation. But such statements of principle help change customary practices, which is the only lasting way to discourage the practice of honorary authorship.

34. OPINIONS OF SENIOR SCIENTISTS ON HONORARY AUTHORSHIP Well-known physicist at MIT: Rate of misconduct low (wrong, unknown at the time) There is APS guidelines and a procedure to complain (wrong) Senior physicist & postdoc ombudsman at LANL: Survey “nasty”: “There is another possible approach to publishing, physics and life, which is to try to be generous and nice” Senior Russian physicist: “I call the phenomenon you described "scientific slavery" ... some … institutions always followed the strict rules of Russian intelligentsia and never committed this sin. However, many other people practiced this scientific serfdom ... Some very influential members of the USSR Academy of Sciences, directors of chemical institutes and members of the Communist Party, coauthored about 500 and more papers each, i.e., coauthored almost all papers published by their institute. Especially widespread was this practice in the industrial scientific institutions - - - people who become "coauthors" often do not understand even what is written in the paper”

35. OPINIONS OF SENIOR SCIENTISTS ON HONORARY AUTHORSHIP Senior physicist at the Max Planck Institute: Not to detriment of junior scientists, only glorifies senior scientists Problem in Germany probably bigger than elsewhere Some senior scientists believe they are “a superior "bunch" and that their mere presence suffices to inspire the work (often it suffices to get jobs to their students anyhow) ... Some of the papers they coauthor are fully wrong. When this is pointed out to them, they say that they only gave the IDEA, they had nothing to do with the execution The rules are indeed unwritten but, at least in physics, by and large they work Student has not forgotten the day he, the supervisor, refused to be a coauthor on the student’s first paper There is a story of a professor who added his name to any paper of his institute. A new member X wrote it himself, gave it to the boss to approve and send for publication and the paper appeared under the authorship of ..... X and Y! German physics guidelines similar to the APS

36. HOW TO IMPROVE THE PROCESS OF ASSIGNING AUTHORSHIP? APS statement on authorship needs: 1. To be more specific (should, for example, specify “significant intellectual contribution” or even “significant original intellectual contribution”) 2. Marketing Authorship assignment process needs change. EITHER: Use patent authorship model - disinterested third party writes down authorship list after inquiring into the work OR: Mandate authorship section which specifies which author did what People need to be able to discuss and complain publicly

37. PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI: THREE PAPERS AND A BOOK ON INTEGRITY IN SCIENCE Paper 1: Does position make a difference during enforcement of ethical misconduct? Paper 2: What is the role of funding in encouraging or discouraging ethical misconduct? Paper 3: Development of the ethical science organization Book: Optimizing Science By Encouraging Integrity

38. PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- DOES POSITION MAKE A DIFFERENCE - “[the Baltimore case] will seem proof that the scientific community can cover up the errors of eminent insiders at the expense of unestablished whistleblowers” (Sir John Maddox, former editor of Nature, New York Times 1991)

39. PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- DOES POSITION MAKE A DIFFERENCE - ”The practice of honorary authorship also deserves scrutiny. Renaissance painters trained their apprentices by allowing them to work on canvases to which the master then signed his name. This tradition gave way, over time, to fairer recognition of an individual artist's contributions. In some fields of science and engineering, it is traditional to place the senior researcher's name on all work done by the group. Not every tradition is good. Honorary authorship diffuses accountability and can lead to irresponsible research.” (Massey, former NSF Director, 1991 commencement speech at MIT)

40. PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- DOES POSITION MAKE A DIFFERENCE - - RESPONDENTS -

41. PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- DOES POSITION MAKE A DIFFERENCE - - NUMBER OF REPORTER ALLEGATIONS -

42. PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- DOES POSITION MAKE A DIFFERENCE - - REPORTER -

43. Existence and accessibility of policies for plagiarism vs. for honorary authorship (plagiarism is primarily a student misconduct while honorary authorship is primarily a faculty misconduct and they are reported to have the same frequency of exposure see (Swazey, Anderson & Lewis)) Knowledge of how to file a report of academic misconduct as a function of academic rank Institutional actions vs. academic rank of respondent Academic rank composition of inquiry/investigation panels Composition of inquiry / investigation panels vs. academic rank of respondent Number of allegations vs. difference in rank between respondent and reporter PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- DOES POSITION MAKE A DIFFERENCE - - POTENTIAL MEASURES -

44. Inspect established misconduct cases for stresses from research funding Conduct survey of funding stresses with the established ethical misconductees Review APS surveys of physics funding PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- ROLE OF FUNDING -

45. Analyze the ORI misconduct policies collection: What type of misconduct is mentioned How tight are the definitions Find corresponding procedures How easily accessible are the procedures How standardized are the procedures Survey different-ranked researchers about handling of misconduct at their institution and awareness of ethical guidelines Create ethical development index for organizations Study how organizations move on this index PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- DEVELOPMENT OF THE ETHICAL ORGANIZATION -

46. What is ethical conduct and misconduct Statistics of ethical misconduct in science How does the scientific community deal with ethical misconduct? Do funding policies make it more difficult to be ethical? How science organizations develop an ethical awareness Ethical development index Study the return on tax payers’ investment in science Find out whether an ethical environment correlates with higher ROI PROPOSAL FOR PROJECT AT ORI- OPTIMIZING SCIENCE BY ENCOURAGING INTEGRITY-

47. SUMMARY Why ethical authorship is important Postdocs are vulnerable Previous work Survey of physics postdocs authorship APS ethical statement not tight, not marketed, not used No communication between postdoc and boss about authorship criteria Substantial amount of inappropriate authorship according to APS ethical statement Institutional response - overall negative Views of senior scientists not that different Power of senior scientists very different How to improve the process of assigning authorship ORI proposal

48. FOR FUN: ARE THERE TWO DIFFERENT TYPES OF RESPONDENTS? FIGURE 1.: Percentage of postdocs versus amount of inappropriate authorship reported. (a) The upper panel shows the experimental data (b) The lower panel shows a typical simulation graph using a single probability of inappropriate author of 17%. Are there two types of respondents? I.e. those who care about the ethics of authorship and those who don’t? Would not be inconsistent with popular stage theories of moral development...