HEP Authorship Survey

Introduction

As HEP Collaborations supporting major experiments grow, there is increasing concern about authorship of scientific publications. The Commission of Particles and Fields (C11) of IUPAP has formed an ad-hoc Working Group (WG), made up of representatives of the major HEP collaborations and a few members of C11, to examine current practices and potential alternatives. For obvious reasons C11 of IUPAP will not and cannot establish rules. It can at best raise conscientiousness and outline proposals and possibly guidelines.


Survey

The purpose of this survey is to sample the community's assessment of the current practices and some ideas for changes discussed by the Working Group. Individuals are asked to please indicate their response, by marking one of seven possible the ratings from -3 (Strongly Disapprove) to 0 (Neutral) to +3 (Strongly Approve).

Information about you

Collaboration membership(s) Current: Previous: Other
What is your position?

What percentage of your time is spent in the categories:
Analysis %
Detector/Ops %
Accelerator %
Management %

(Optional) Age
(Optional) Gender Male Female

Your reaction to authorship ideas



Current Practice
Currently, published physics analyses are signed by all eligible members of the collaborations. The articles are published in physics journals or submitted as contributions to conferences and/or posted to the electronic archive. The authors are usually listed in alphabetical order, by institution and by name. Thus for most collaboration the first author is the same for all publications.


Current Belle Practice
The Belle Collaboration has introduced a voluntary sign-up for authorship of each individual publication. As a result of this procedure, many individuals only sign a fraction of all publications and the number of authors listed has been decreasing steadily with time. Currently, only one half of the number of eligible authors sign up.

Alternate Scheme
Research in large HEP collaborations is performed by subgroups focusing on specific analyses and supported by technical groups responsible for detector operations, calibrations, computing, data processing and software development. In this situation one may ask whether it makes sense to partition the collaborations into 10-15 consortia, probably along the lines set by the various analysis working groups, with individual scientists participating in at least one, in some cases two and in exceptional cases more working groups. Scientists responsible for technical tasks should be encouraged to join one of these working groups, contribute their expertise and take part in meetings, review of various analyses, etc.. Individual consortia could introduce a sign-up for authorship like Belle, and thus allow members of the working groups to decide case-by-case whether their contribution truly justifies authorship. Other collaborators who contributed through review activities or special tasks to the research to be published should also be encouraged to sign-up. The federated support by the collaboration as a whole through the development of common techniques and the publication board and analysis coordinators could remain the same. Most likely, such a reduction in authorship would only be established after the first one or two years of operation, following the establishment of the most common software and calibration procedures.

Your comments



Daniel Whiteson
danielw@fnal.gov
September 20, 2005