Sounds a lot like academia really and the open secret in many fields that the graduate "coauthors" were really the ones who did the work and the "main author" was the do nothing but compensated and credited more professor who hypocritically starts off every course stating plagiarism will not be tolerated.
The lack of transparency is what makes both of them bad. It would be one thing if an established member vouched for someone new as a supervisor to be clear they followed existing standards of experimentation and research or explicitly admitted they went from a 1/20th scale model to a granite and steel statue with modifications because the original was structurally unsound with different materials.
> Sounds a lot like academia really and the open secret in many fields that the graduate "coauthors" were really the ones who did the work and the "main author" was the do nothing but compensated and credited more professor
People say this a lot but I don't see it at all. The graduate students go first on the paper author list, and the professor goes last.
The graduate students wouldn't want to be listed last, because at their stage of their career they want to be seen as doing the work, and the professors wouldn't want to be listed first, because at their stage of their career they want to be seen as supervising not doing the actual work.
The system seems really clear to me, and you can give your 'credit' (what that is that you really mean, since it's a bit abstract) to whichever of those people you want.
Or you could see the research as the collaborative process that it is and credit everyone!
Pharmaceutical industry uses ghostwriters who are not even coauthors.
Medical ghostwriter
>Medical ghostwriters are employed by pharmaceutical companies and medical-device manufacturers to produce apparently independent manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations and other communications. Physicians and other scientists are paid to attach their names to the manuscripts as though they had authored them. The named authors may have had little or no involvement in the research or writing process.
Prevalence:
>It is difficult to determine how frequently ghostwriting occurs due to its covert nature. A 2009 New York Times article estimated that 11% of New England Journal of Medicine articles, 8% of JAMA, Lancet and PLoS Medicine articles, 5% of Annals of Internal Medicine articles and 2% of Nature Medicine were ghost written.[22] Between 1998 and 2005 Wyeth had 26 papers promoting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) published in scientific journals.[23]
> Previously secret internal Wyeth documents providing evidence of this are viewable on the Drug Industry Document Archive. It also appears to have occurred in 75% of industry funded trials between 1994 - 1995 approved by the Scientific Ethical Committees for Copenhagen and Frederiksberg.[1] Of the articles published from 1998 to 2000 regarding sertraline, between 18% and 40% were ghost written by Pfizer.[1] A questionnaire using comparable methods in 2005 and 2008 with a 14-28% response rate found a decrease in number of people who reported ghostwriting among professional medical writers.[24
That comment about academia is not universally true at all. Grad students frequently get first author status on papers they do the bulk of the work on. The typical abuse that is more commonplace is the inclusion of advisors as last authors on papers that they didn’t contribute to at all (other than writing the proposal that won the funding that supported it). That’s why journals began adopting a requirement that the contribution of each author be made clear in the paper (usually a section near the end).
I actually think it's almost the opposite in my experience as a physicist. Often graduate students are given the first author position, the position which indicates the most credit, even though in many ways the graduate student is closer to a highly skilled technician following the path laid down by their more experienced professor.
The OP is right to raise questions about this in academics.
The problem is that all sorts of things happens in academics:
The grad student is first author and the professor is last author, and people see the credit that way.
The grad student is first author and the professor is last, but people see the prof as the "real" first author. Look at citation formats and explain why the last author is kept on lengthy author lists in many. It's because last author doesn't mean least work anymore. I know a colleague who quietly started jockeying to be last author on papers because he knew it was almost as/more prestigious than first.
The grad student is first and the professor is anywhere else but people assume that it's the profs work because "grad students are just learning" or some such thing.
The grad student deserves the credit but is second or third or something else because of power differentials involving all the other authors.
The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft and offered some minor feedback.
A coauthor formulating and doing the analyses, without whom the paper could not exist because they were the ones translating the theories into quantifiable testable models, are left off the paper because "analyses don't deserve credit" or something.
Really, anything and everything goes in academics. It's broken. I realize that there are people/groups who practice with integrity but this is not something you can assume everywhere. Even when people are trying to have integrity, weird scenarios develop that have no good solutions.
I think this issue with art technicians vs artists is really a model of many problems with income inequality in society. The implementation matters. The people who bring it to fruition matter. They deserve credit and compensation. Ideas without execution are just ideas. I honestly can't believe we even entertain the idea that execution is valueless, or that we have discussions where people fetishize Steve Jobs so much that he's treated as the sole creator behind the iphone, as if he caused it to materialize out of thin air, and the previous phones by LG, and the engineers, and designers, and everyone else are just stupid uncreative hacks who were just following Job's orders down to the microcircuitry on the chips.
Its fraud and it's rampant in society today. For some reason we're uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every innovation or product is the result of some distributed, collaborative effort, and often really involves many people making small contributions.
> The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft and offered some minor feedback.
> For some reason we're uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every innovation or product is the result of some distributed, collaborative effort, and often really involves many people making small contributions.
These two points seem at odds to each other, why should the professor be given no credit?
The lack of transparency is what makes both of them bad. It would be one thing if an established member vouched for someone new as a supervisor to be clear they followed existing standards of experimentation and research or explicitly admitted they went from a 1/20th scale model to a granite and steel statue with modifications because the original was structurally unsound with different materials.