Commentary: Too many authors, too few creators

A few years ago, Robert Fefferman, dean of physical sciences at the University of Chicago, made an interesting remark. He mentioned that Enrico Fermi, wanting to encourage individual creativity and innovation, required his PhD students to select their problem, solve it, and submit the results for publication in their name alone. Fermi also was aware that a multiauthor paper with one famous author might receive automatic acceptance rather than a thoughtful and thorough review. Many PhD students then and since have published their theses under joint authorship with their advisers. Unfortunately, the need among grant-seeking academics to publish and be cited often grew stronger, especially during federal funding cutbacks, the most recent example being the cuts in science budgets under President George W. Bush. When applying for government grants, an applicant team’s record of many cited publications was important to confirm that the submitted proposal had significant cachet for continuing support. A vicious cycle began.

Over the years, publication lists were increasing. Some colleagues boasted more than 300 publications and one close to 800! The number of authors associated with each published article was also increasing; single-author papers had become relatively rare. Were Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and other great scientists just lucky in finding simple ideas that one mind could understand and present? Or was technological creativity becoming so difficult that great teams of scientists were required to recognize and develop it?

Seeking answers, I made a cursory examination of some publication records of the last half century. I selected the eight publications listed in the table to the right and selected the first issue of each from January 1965 and from January 2011. To compare innovation over time, I included data on the first 100 patents issued to US applicants by the US Patent and Trademark Office during the corresponding periods. The data were gleaned from the office’s weekly Official Gazette.

The results seem truly astonishing. Although the data sets selected are relatively small, they show the downward trend of individual creativity. Most of the papers studied were written by authors in, or associated with, academia. A few came from government laboratories and some from industry.

It has long been evident that some professors established groups of graduate students whose main activities were often focused on publishing research results. Authorship of such articles expanded to include all members of the group despite only the peripheral or negligible contributions by some, historically referenced in an acknowledgements section. Over the years, nonacademic groups, especially in the life and pharmaceutical sciences, added to the publication proliferation; R&D directors often put their names on every paper leaving their lab. A person even slightly involved with a project would be added as an author. What began as an innovative topic of investigation became an opportunity to be published and thereby increase one’s personal citation numbers. Thus participants who simply made measurements, or converted the measurements into appropriate numbers, or kept the equipment operating were all listed as purportedly creative coauthors. What was actually the creativity of one or two authors became the work of a great many. And each such paper carried the name of the professor whose contract or grant paid for the work. Thus if the paper turned out to be important, the multitude of authors could add impressively to their CVs.

On occasion there even may have been a sinister element to the process of adding authors. For example, the author list might include a friend or colleague of the lead scientist, an indirect financial supporter, or a contractor’s technical representative. No author would ever discuss this matter publicly.

Many problems of irrelevant authorship arise with the journals themselves. Although all journals provide manuscript preparation guidelines that include some type of warning against “double publishing”—that is, repeating significant portions in another paper—only a few ask the contact author to confirm that the listed authors all contributed to the paper. Both Science and Cell, for example, do ask that all authors of an accepted paper “state their contribution to the paper,” but they do not list any criteria for actual authorship, nor whether specific types of contributors should be relegated to an acknowledgement section.

A friend of mine, a former Bell Labs physicist, defended the inclusion of his name to the end of the author queue of each paper published by his students though many of the ideas were entirely his. His reasoning was that “the graduate student should always have top billing so that his career can be advanced.” Each author’s personal list of “first author” publications was certainly increased by my friend’s unselfish generosity. It remained up to the reader to figure out whose ideas were actually being presented.

Whereas in former days, a PhD candidate during graduate school would prepare only a single paper based entirely on his or her work, the trend today is to leave graduate school with a raft of publications, considered essential for a job or postdoctoral appointment. Unfortunately, the time spent getting published often seems to be at the expense of obtaining the greater in-depth knowledge of the science itself. In the hundreds of interviews and CV reviews I have conducted over the past 25 years, I have found the presence of the basic building blocks of the science decreasing with each passing year. When a recent PhD in a physical science said that helium formed diatomic molecules, I knew we were in trouble!

The patent data shown in the table are of particular interest. The percentages for two or three inventors per invention for the most recently issued patents do not vary greatly from the percentages for 46 years earlier. Here’s why: If a listed inventor, or “innovator,” did not actually contribute to the invention, the issued patent will be void if such deception is ever discovered. The patents most easily challenged in court may well be those with extraordinary numbers of inventors.

Here’s a final Fermi-inspired question: How many of today’s tenured faculty members or research directors have never written a single-author paper?