Deciding Authorship Order? Tally Up Your Dragon Kill Points!

One of the most stressful parts of finishing a manuscript comes long before hitting the submit button on the journal website—it’s deciding who gets to be an author and in what order. While some disciplines or individual laboratories have standard ways to determine authorship, such as ordering names alphabetically, this is not the case in all fields. With publication authorship being such an important aspect of determining a scientist’s career, this ambiguity can lead to conflict and hurt feelings, especially among early career researchers.

“The first rule of authorship is we don't talk about authorship,” joked April Martinig, an ecologist at the University of Sherbrooke. “They say, ‘It's just vibes. That's how we figure it out.’ And I'm like, ‘What does that mean? Does that not fill you with anxiety?’”

Martinig and her colleagues knew there had to be a better way. Their solution? Dragons.

Drawing inspiration from multiplayer games where each person takes on a specific role to work together in a quest to defeat a dragon, the researchers developed Dragon Kill Points as a system to track each person’s contribution over the course of a project.¹ By incorporating principles of transparency and granularity in specifying tasks, the scientists hope that this system can help recognize team members’ contributions and take out much of the stress in authorship assignment.

Tracking Contributions with Dragon Kill Points

Long before Martinig entertained ideas of loot and dragon slayers, she noticed that one of her colleagues Malgorzata (Losia) Lagisz, a research associate in ecologist Shinichi Nakagawa’s group then at the University of New South Wales, diligently kept track of who did what on each project in the lab.

“I started doing a project with her where I was like, ‘We could actually scale this up and really think about what this means as an authorship system rather than just something that we keep on an Excel sheet on one of our computers,’” Martinig said. “We could actually help a lot of people do research differently.”

She and her colleagues began discussing the features a clear and fair authorship system should have as well as the weaknesses in current systems to avoid. In the end, they came up with five principles on which to base their system: granularity, responsibility, equity, autonomy, and transparency (GREAT). Granularity entails breaking tasks down into specific and measurable details; responsibility involves setting expectations before the project begins; equity entails that the rules of the system apply to each team member equally; autonomy gives people the ability to decide how much or how little they’d like to contribute to the project; and transparency ensures that all team members can see everyone’s level of involvement.

At the start of the project, the team makes a list of the potential tasks and people involved in completing those tasks. As the project moves forward and people complete their work, they earn Dragon Kill Points. At this stage, the team can decide to add or take away tasks, depending on what’s needed for the project.

“One of the things I like about [this process] is that I'm able to clearly communicate with people about where their authorship order is based on their contributions,” Martinig said. “For coauthors, it especially gave them a clear view of, ‘If I did this task, it might bump me up, or it might make no difference. So, maybe I'm okay with being further down the line because I don't have time’…But then for some more junior authors, they were like, ‘Oh, I can contribute more, and this will have a noticeable impact in my order position.’”

At the end of the project, the researchers then tally up their accumulated Dragon Kill Points, and the author list flows from those with the most points to those with the least. However, Martinig noted that this is not a one-size-fits-all system. For example, certain fields may have conventions like always putting the principal investigator of the lab as the last author. “The point is to have the conversation to begin with and then acknowledge the conventions in your field within the system,” she said. “Acknowledge that upfront rather than having that be an unspoken rule.”

Early Career and Senior Researchers Benefit from Dragon Kill Points

So far, the response to Dragon Kill Points among the scientific community has been very positive overall.

“I did a talk two weeks ago, and there were maybe almost 45, 50 people that showed up because they were like, ‘What is this about?’ And I was like, ‘Perfect. [Let’s] talk about something that's going to make you really uncomfortable, but we're going to start with dragons,’” Martinig said.

She has received a lot of interest from early career researchers especially, asking her where to find templates for the system and for advice on convincing their advisors to adopt the process. “What made me really passionate about this especially was to try to make some sort of space for students especially to have some ground to stand on to talk about authorship,” said Martinig. “Psychological safety is a big part of what I hope people take away from this.”

Senior researchers are a bit more hesitant to adopt the Dragon Kill Points system, Martinig said. They mostly worry about how much the upfront time investment of implementing it in their groups would be.

“One of the suggestions we [have] is that whoever's leading the project could be the person responsible for keeping track of Dragon Kill Points because they're involved the most,” Martinig said.

Scientific journals have also pushed back somewhat on the inclusion of Dragon Kill Points, saying that there are already credit statements at the end of a publication. But Martinig pointed out that those categories are often too broad for researchers reading the paper to know exactly which parts of the project an author worked on. If a scientist wanted to replicate or follow up on a specific experiment in the paper, they would know exactly who to contact based on the inclusion of each author’s Dragon Kill Points.

At the end of the day, Martinig is hopeful that the Dragon Kill Points system can make the publication process less stressful for all scientists, regardless of their career status. “I always thought I contributed way more to projects than I actually did, and since using Dragon Kill Points, I got to see how much I overestimate my own contributions,” she said. “It really took a team. Without these people, it wouldn't have been possible.”