Jtdcftul

To what extent does coming up with a research idea, without contributing anything else to the actual work, constitute a sufficient contribution to be an author?

As a hypothetical, suppose a five year-old child tells me day that he wonders if banana peels can be used to cure leukemia. I am intrigued by the idea and go and write a research proposal. The proposal gets funded (!) and I get positive results (!!). In this case, does the child deserve authorship for coming up with the idea, which I might never have considered?

On the one hand, I can say that some ideas are often very creative and novel to the point where just coming up with the idea is a significant intellectual endeavor (recognizing an unsolved problem, knowing enough theory to hypothesize what might work, knowing what has been tried in the past, using raw intelligence to put things together, etc.), while on the other hand I could trivially write a script to brute-force-dictionary an arbitrarily long list of "ideas" and then scoop authorship on large numbers of future papers - "Umm, your paper's title was one of 43343895234 that I generated earlier this year with a script, I am entitled to have my name on your paper as an author even though I am not actually doing anything to help, since I had the idea first."

Ideas:

• Coming up with an idea always deserves authorship as long as the idea was novel.


• Coming up with an idea deserves authorship only when the idea-maker establishes a sufficient foundation for the idea (e.g. randomly proposing a cure for cancer by picking random chemical names out of a dictionary and hoping for a jackpot cannot result in authorship, while providing a theoretical basis for why a specific chemical might work does, even if the idea-generator leaves it at that and does none of the actual experimental design, lab work, etc., or quite possibly is not even qualified to do so.)


• An idea is never sufficient for authorship. Proposing an idea, without doing any of the actual work, merits at most an acknowledgement or a citation ("Thanks to John McWhatever for coming up with the idea of solving the Closeability Problem by applying hyperparallelized matrices across the transverse manifold.", or "On an online Question and Answer site, Columbia (2019) proposed the use of banana peels in curing leukemia, but did not provide a theoretical basis or a practical methodology. In this paper, I demonstrate a clinically significant benefit of 10g banana peel topical tincture daily versus placebo in the treatment of leukemia....").

I will give an answer that applies to mathematics and maybe some other things. It isn't quite your second point, but close. Background first.

Newcomers to maths think of it as a bunch of facts. You learn some of those facts in early schooling but don't get a wider view. If you study maths at a higher level you think of it as proving theorems. Some facts and a bit of logic let you derive other facts. But if that is as far as you go, then you really aren't yet a mathematician. A mathematician is a person with enough insight into the workings of the thing that they can propose things that might be theorems if they could only be proven. But this isn't, to a mathematician, just making random statements. There has to be a reason why something is suspected to be true. Things that are likely to be true.

So, if the kid just randomly proposes a connection between bananas and leukemia, then it isn't worthy of authorship. But if a person with deep insight into the workings of the disease and the properties of bananas proposes it as a topic of study then, yes, they could/should certainly be a co-author of the study even if others do the actual proof of the concept.

It is the insight into the likely connection that has value.

Otherwise, you might just be sent off on a random quest without any hope of success.

However, in mathematics, if an advisor suggests a problem to a student, having the insight that the student hasn't yet developed, it is still pretty rare to demand co-authorship unless there is more of a collaboration in the development. But this is just the custom. Certainly it is worthy of acknowledgement, and maybe even co-authorship. It isn't even necessary in this case that the advisor have an outline of a proof, or even any deep insight into how to develop it. It is just insight into a problem worth pursuing.

But if it is, in mathematics, not an advisor-student relationship and one proposes an idea to another, I suspect that co-authorship would feel more natural, but probably with an acknowledgement section in the resulting paper that details the contributions. But in this case, also, it is more likely that the work would be developed cooperatively, so the authorship question would be obvious.

Other fields than mathematics have different views on authorship, of course, but it is, even there, a question of insight. Among an infinite number of roads, someone proposes one as worthy of following. If you follow that you owe them something for putting you on the path. How you acknowledge it is a matter of custom that varies from field to field.

I do not think we can have a general answer here. It will always depend on a lot of factors; mostly because research is, unfortunately, not only ideas, but work and resources. Let me tell you my point; if a Professor (or anybody else, let's call it the proposer) has some insight like the one about bananas and cancer and proposes the topic to some PhD student or postdoc or Assoc. Prof. or whatever (let's call it the worker), the latter will probably have a need of resources in order to carry out the researcher. If the proposer can also provide funds, lab or resources, I think she should be a co-author of the paper, patent, whatever. Also because this is a cycle and the proposer with more papers in the new subject will have more chances to secure funding and therefore provide with them to the worker. So at the end this is a symbiosis and the proposer should be on the paper, where of course, she must at least read it and give feedback. And this should be ethical as well. Why not?

In practical manners, many advisors get co-authorships just for proposing projects versus doing work on them. This probably doesn't really cross the threshold for a real contribution. And it seems to be very different in how it is applied to PIs versus fellow students or even people outside the lab group. (I could write 50+ great projects to do...should I get co-authorship from whoever does them? Even if I transmit the list to people? Not really.)

But I think at the end of the day, you have to realize that the idealistic vision of coauthorship does not really apply. At least in experimental R1 science with big lab groups. It hasn't for at least last 50 years. And the professors actually need to collect the co-authorships to keep writing grants, get tenure/promoted, etc.

You're better off just figuring that it is a tribal custom, like wearing clothes, that you have to deal with. Plus, they're at the back of the bus (stereotypically) in terms of the byline name order. So don't let it bug you too much, man.