Sir

The recent leading article on authorship (Nature 387, 831 831; 1997) struck a resonance within our team, as we have been wrestling with this demon for many years. Ours is an interdisciplinary undertaking, the success of which required extensive (and sometimes tedious) apparatus and software development before the first science results appeared (Nature 365, 621 621; 1993).

The joint effort of a team of computer scientists, astronomers and physicists was essential, and deciding who should appear as authors on what paper, and in what order, continues to be the source of much gut-wrenching internal debate.

Which was the more important contribution: the construction of the apparatus, the Terabyte database software, the time-series analysis, the detection efficiency determination, the comparison with models or the actual drafting of the paper? How should we compensate for the opportunity cost incurred by talented scientists who took on essential but time-consuming code development, forgoing the chance to publish ‘idea’ papers?

After considerable debate, we decided early on to use alphabetical authorship, because it may be awful but it's better than the alternatives (most of which seem to involve hand-to-hand combat between alleged colleagues). We have not been able to devise a scheme that is ‘fairer’, despite considerable creative effort.

Having made the decision to go with the alphabetical approach, we nevertheless seem condemned to revisit the topic every other year. Legitimate issues such as career advancement for junior team members, recognition for individual effort and initiative, and significant cultural differences between our disciplines remain sources of debate.

I am convinced that, in large collaborative undertakings that by their very nature make it difficult to decide the relative priority of individual contributions, the science is best served with alphabetical authorship. It is then incumbent on the more senior members of the team to spell out the individual contributions of students, postdocs and junior faculty members when recommendations are solicited, and to take active steps to draw attention to their efforts.

Concrete suggestions that might ease some of the problems include journal policies that would accommodate or even encourage papers authored by a team, with the individual aspects being secondary and less emphasis on first authorship for career advancement in disciplines where papers with 10 or more authors are not yet common.