Vu-Quoc replies: James Scott describes a knee-jerk reaction of short-sighted authors who focus on getting more credit for a single paper but lose sight of the bigger picture.
Ethical guidelines such as those of the American Chemical Society 1 clearly state that “the coauthors of a paper should be all those persons who have made significant scientific contributions to the work.” Most authors would follow these guidelines and share the credit—and sometimes the blame—for the work. 2,3
Many journals already require each author of a paper to state his or her contribution. 4 Coauthors are sometimes listed for ethically questionable reasons. 5 Inflated authorship, like inflated grades, devalues authentic authorship, does not contribute to good education, and misleads potential employers. The author impact factor (AIF) is a statistical average over a collection of papers. Its unintended consequence is to promote effective and genuine collaboration, good collaborative work, and adherence to the ethical guidelines for authors. 1
Instead of such narrow issues as, for example, trying to get more credit for a paper, the AIF concept, with its robustness against database errors, addresses much more broadly the challenges of ranking the publication impact (reputation) of heterogeneous groups of researchers—for example, for use in the ranking of doctoral programs.
