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Fixing authorship In his column "Me first!" Glenn McGee proposes two changes to fix the system of scientific authorship.1 Drawing simple authorship rules is easy when a paper requires a single field of expertise and can be understood by all authors. However, many papers require that people from different fields come together, and not all authors will understand all the aspects of the paper, even if they devised part of the strategy. How can rules deal with that? Disputes aris

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In his column "Me first!" Glenn McGee proposes two changes to fix the system of scientific authorship.1 Drawing simple authorship rules is easy when a paper requires a single field of expertise and can be understood by all authors. However, many papers require that people from different fields come together, and not all authors will understand all the aspects of the paper, even if they devised part of the strategy. How can rules deal with that?

Disputes arise because of unreasonable demands needing to be met in order to obtain a higher degree, a grant, or a position. Until we consider those aspects, nothing will change. Moreover, asking for only the five most relevant publications of a soon-to-be-graduated PhD student for a postdoctoral grant application is not a step in the right direction!

Genevieve Bart
Kuopio, Finland bart@uku.fi

I feel that the article "How the lysophospholipid got its receptor" 1 ...

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