Coming to Grips with Coauthor Responsibility

The scientific community struggles to define the duties of collaborators in assuring the integrity of published research.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 8 min read

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When cancer researcher Ben Bonavida accepted a visiting graduate student from Japan into his lab at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) just over a decade ago, he treated Eriko Suzuki like every other student he had supervised for the past 30 years. “I met with her regularly,” Bonavida recalls. “We went over her data, she showed me all the Westerns, all the experiments.” After months spent working on the cancer therapeutic rituximab’s mechanism of action, “she presented her findings to me and the other collaborators in the lab, and based on that we published a paper in Oncogene.”

Appearing in 2007, the paper accrued nearly 40 citations over the next seven years. But in April 2014, the study gained a less favorable mention ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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