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Who did what: changing how science papers are written to detail author contributions

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology (2023)Cite this article

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We suggest an alternative approach to ascribing authorship in scientific papers. We argue that it should be known who thought of each idea, who ran each experiment, and who analysed the data. To achieve this, we suggest two easy-to-implement methods that could fundamentally change how authors’ contributions are assessed.

Harry Truman famously said “it is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit”. Although this noble idea may be true, credit is unfortunately essential for academics. Authors’ contribution to scientific publications is the single most important factor that determines how they are evaluated, hired, promoted and funded.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology, Wise Faculty of Life Sciences & Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oded Rechavi

  2. Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany

    Pavel Tomancak

Authors
  1. Oded Rechavi
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  2. Pavel Tomancak
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Correspondence to Oded Rechavi or Pavel Tomancak.

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Rechavi, O., Tomancak, P. Who did what: changing how science papers are written to detail author contributions. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-023-00587-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-023-00587-x

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