Scientific collaboration pt 2

Sofia Liberman, a psychologist from Mexico, presented a nice study of how author order and task assignment is determined in physics and biotechnology labs. What she's talking about is who gets listed first in the list of authors for a journal article. There didn't seem to be a consensus in physics (which matches their collaborative, non-hierarchical working groups), but the biologists seem to agree that those that do the most work get put first.

Blaise Cronin got a little closer to actually talking about collaborative work, and argued that acknowledgement sections of journal articles can be used as a metric for what Patel, in the 1970s called 'sub-authorship'. He had great, lengthy examples from "Cell." From his own ('tedious and labor intensive') studies, and from someone else's newly automated (as yet unpublished) analysis, he says that some people become acknowledgement superstars.