Abstract
In health sciences, technical contributions may be undervalued and excluded in the author byline. In this paper, I demonstrate how authorship is a historical construct which perpetuates systemic injustices including technical undervaluation. I make use of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual work to demonstrate how the power dynamics at play in academia make it very challenging to change the habitual state or “habitus”. To counter this, I argue that we must reconceive technical contributions to not be a priori less important based on its nature when assigning roles and opportunities leading to authorship. I make this argument based on two premises. First, science has evolved due to major information and biotechnological innovation; this requires ‘technicians’ to acquire and exercise a commensurate high degree of both technical and intellectual expertise which in turn increases the value of their contribution. I will illustrate this by providing a brief historical view of work statisticians, computer programmers/data scientists and laboratory technicians. Second, excluding or undervaluing this type of work is contrary to norms of responsibility, fairness and trustworthiness of the individual researchers and of teams in science. Although such norms are continuously tested because of power dynamics, their importance is central to ethical authorship practice and research integrity. While it may be argued that detailed disclosure of contributions (known as contributorship) increases accountability by clearly identifying who did what in the publication, I contend that this may unintentionally legitimize undervaluation of technical roles and may decrease integrity of science. Finally, this paper offers recommendations to promote ethical inclusion of technical contributors.
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Notes
The notion of a priori is related to a theoretical deduction which proceeds specific experience.
I believe that this argument may be relevant in many other academic fields, however it is outside the scope of this present paper.
Perception of “technical” contribution or work is found throughout the scholarly literature and will be reviewed in detail in the following sections. Authors such as Shapin (1989), Barley and Bechky, (1994), Latour and Woolgar, (1979) and Conti and Liu, (2015) perceive laboratory scientist to be technical contributors. Wang et al., (2019) describe computational science and data sciences as technical fields and Scroggins and Pasquetto, (2020) describe how data-scientists conduct technical labor. Parker and Berman, (1998) and LeBlanc et al., (2022) suggest that statisticians are often viewed as technical advisors or technicians.
The wide variety of authorship guidance includes: the ICMJE guidelines, the World Association for Medical Editors (WAME) guidelines, as well as certain publisher and often certain journal guidance. For more information and discussion regarding guidelines see Matheson, (2011), Moffatt, (2018) and Resnik et al., (2016).
Certain statisticians do differentiate between a consulting role and a collaborative role. A consulting role may include brief simple statistical questions or simple test (T test or power analysis) that would not be granted authorship. A collaborative role requires a more substantive role (Perkins et al., 2016).
In very large multi-center studies, alternative modes of teaming may be required to promote ethical collaboration and trustworthiness in teams. For ethical issues in multi-centered teams see Rosenberg et al. (2015).
Even if contributorship may highlight general roles of a technical nature, Hosseini et al. (2023) explains how Contributor Role Ontologies or Taxonomies does not provide sufficient detail to adequately differentiate technical contributions in different domains of research.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Resnik for his critical feedback on this manuscript.
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This research is supported in part from the Clinical and Translational Science Award (UL1TR001439) from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health.
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Smith, E. “Technical” Contributors and Authorship Distribution in Health Science. Sci Eng Ethics 29, 22 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-023-00445-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-023-00445-1