Although many scientific journals try to provide more details about author contributions by requiring explicit statements, such contribution statements get much less attention than authorship order, according to new findings from a Georgia Tech-University of Passau team. The authors found that while researchers evaluating a paper consider contribution statements helpful for understanding the specific skills individual team members brought to the study, they still use author order for deciphering which researchers did how much of the work and deserve most of the credit. Authorship is a topic that looms large on the minds of researchers. Publications play a major role in career advancement at universities and research institutions, and authorship order is a widely used, but imprecise, way of inferring contributions from researchers. In part, the problem with contribution statements is that they aren't always available, and when they are, the statements tend to have no uniform structure.
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