A qualitative study of Equal Co-First Authorship

ABSTRACT

Over the past several years, there has been a significant increase in the number of scientific articles with two or more authors claiming “Equal Co-First Authorship” (ECFA). This study provides a critical background to ECFA designations, discusses likely causes of its increased use, and explores arguments for and against the practice. Subsequently, it presents the results of a qualitative study that sought the opinion of 19 authors listed among equal first authors of recent publications in leading scientific journals about ECFA designations. Results show that circumstances leading to ECFA designations vary significantly from each other. While the development of policies for these situations would not be easy, participants suggested that the lack of clear and consistent policies regarding the attribution and evaluation of ECFA contributes to tensions amongst ECFA authors and obscures their preferred attributions of credit.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• publications
• ethics
• equal contributions
• Equal Co-First Authorship

Acknowledgments

The authors wishes to acknowledge Olivia Leblanc and Katie Mayer for their assistance in identifying potential participants and to our interviewees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As of 2016, some 84% of new Ph.Ds in the field will fail to secure a tenure-track position, and a comparable over-supply problem exists in disciplines like chemistry and biology (Kolata 2016). Federal grant funding has become more competitive as well. The average age for a first time PI on an R01-equivalent NIH grant increased to 43, and while 30.5% of NIH grant applications were successful in 1997, by 2014 that number had shrunk to 18% (Edwards and Roy 2017).

2. In the Olympics, for example, when two competitors tie for first, both receive gold medals, no silver medal is awarded, and a third athlete is awarded the bronze medal. Following out the logic, one might argue that unlike ECFA, when there is a tie for first, the Olympics award system implies each winner in effect is a gold/silver medalist, but in absence of an effective way to “split the difference” between gold and silver, each is awarded the gold. By comparison, the ambiguity of crediting norms in the ECFA case makes apportionment in those contexts murkier.

3. Strictly speaking, it is not entirely clear what playing an equal role in drafting the manuscript might consist of. One might think it means each writes an equal number of words. Not only is this highly unlikely; typically, not all parts of the paper are equally difficult to write. And the writing process involves more than generating words: editing, proofreading, tracking down and properly formatting citation information, and so forth: these are all integral to the drafting process, yet they resist easy quantification.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Dr. Aubrey Lucas Research Grant, the University of Southern Mississippi.