A collision of co-authors

Three trials of a scientific paper writer: the first trial

[While busy writing a Very Important Scientific Paper, I’ve been taking the occasional break to meditate on the challenges and frustrations of the paper-writing process. I have already provided sensible advice for the aspiring scientific author, and discussed the vital importance of taking regular breaks (even to Trump’s America). Now we get down to the serious business with three indispensable lessons on the sausage-making successful completion of a scientific paper.]

How hard is it to write a scientific paper? I mean, putting aside the initial impediments of first requiring more than a decade of scientific training, and identifying an interesting research question, and producing robust and relevant results from your investigation of said research question, and also discounting the usual writing problems of motivation and procrastination and “What should the first word be?” In short: forgetting the usual insurmountable difficulties, are there other things to worry about?

Ha ha! You can guess the answer to that one! Yes, of course there are!

I will mention here just a few. (I have my own paper to write, and as such, tight constraints on my procrastination time.)

One problem is other people. I'm not just talking about the other people on the project; you must have all worked out how to get along swimmingly to get the results in the first place¹. No, I'm referring to the additional people who will suddenly turn out to be involved once the paper writing begins. This is almost certain to happen unless you have made an iron-clad agreement with your one or two co-authors, or you're writing a paper by yourself.

I cannot make informed comments about single-author papers. I wrote a paper by myself once, and it was terrifying. I had no idea if what I was doing was correct, or whether it was interesting, or if I was explaining it well. I could have asked someone for advice, but then they might have asked to be a co-author. The situation seemed impossible, until I had the brilliant idea of showing it to my girlfriend. That saved me. Her feedback was extremely useful. In the first paragraph she highlighted a sentence that said, “In this paper I have calculated...”

She said, “You didn't calculate that in the paper. You calculated it in your office.”

“Wow! That’s fantastic feedback!”

“Can I be a co-author?”

Don't worry, I got out of it fine. I proposed marriage instead. (You can't let that level of editorial brilliance slip through your fingers!)

I could use that trick only once, so ever since I have always acquired some extra authors at the late stage of a paper. Sometimes they can be very helpful. They can provide a fresh perspective and can help to make the paper clearer and the presentation more logical. I say “can” because they certainly can provide these insights in principle. In practice they never do. The only exceptions have been when I've kindly agreed to be a co-author myself.

The main role of the additional authors is to make sure that your work is put into the proper context. The “proper context” means making it very clear to the reader that, while the current paper does indeed present sufficient new results to qualify as yet another entry in all of the authors' publication lists, earlier papers by a subset of the authors were much more important. Indeed, the “proper context” in which to view the latest paper is that it serves to highlight several wonderful new ways in which to appreciate the brilliance of the earlier papers.

That makes it sound like your new friends will all be unscrupulous and malicious. Of course they most likely are — what do you expect from the kinds of senior careerist leeches who leap unexpectedly from the marshes and cesspools of academia and latch themselves vampirically onto innocent publications? — but some are worse. They are the Ernest Scholars. They have likely appeared in the entourage of the leeches, and they will pore over your paper in excruciating detail. Once again, that can be useful, and many a sloppy paper has been tidied up and many a foolish claim been deleted following the arrival of these worthy pedants, but that's the rare exception. Usually they will bloat the paper with qualifiers and exceptions and long paragraphs of digressions, and worst of all, transform your vain attempts at clarity into clouds of fog.

Sadly, the scientific career filter prefers bloody-minded pedantry over prose concision, and, as I have alluded to in the past, people do not decide to become scientists because of their love for the simple declarative sentence. The natural end result of your new authors' advice is therefore linguistic mush. Your most important results will now be buried beneath incomprehensible blather, and the least interesting sentences on the most minor points will have expanded into paragraphs of irrelevant dross.

A determined writer can resist this, sometimes successfully. But their likely reward will be the opportunity to write yet bigger papers, with yet larger collections of collaborators, and yet more preposterously inflated author lists. This process continues until the once glorious captain of many fine vessels of knowledge is finally radicalised into the worst kind of leech themselves, or reduced to a gibbering mediocrity indistinguishable from any other academic.

Most are defeated long before they reach that stage.

The lumbering and thundering of the additional authors is nothing compared to the arguments over the order of the author list.

“The what!?” you ask. “Surely it's alphabetical?”

Nice try. It is an unavoidable fact that one name must go first, and a safe assumption that most readers will identify that name with the “lead author” of the project. It is certainly an assumption made by every desperate postdoc and psychopathic professor co-authoring the paper.

The order of the author list will remain the most existential problem on any scientific paper until the day that electronic journals allow the authors’ names to perpetually shuffle themselves at random every time the paper is viewed — at which point there will be interminable arguments over the fraction of time that each name appears in the top spot, and far fewer papers will ever be finished. (So: definite progress.)

Although it is not possible to rationally and amicably decide a correct author list ordering, it is possible to identify a clear spectrum of feverish hunger to go first. You will see that it is a steeply logarithmic scale.

1. Innocent PhD student. “I'm not sure if I've done enough work to be on this paper.”

2. Junior postdoc. “You need to put me first, to support Early Career Researchers.”

3. Senior postdoc. “You have to put me first, if you want the antidote to this deadly poison I sprinkled onto our writing team pizza lunch.”

4. Senior professor. “During my many decades in academia I have acquired immunity to all standard poisons.” (The more cultivated class of professor will of course quote from this famous scene.)

Even if the paper's real authors survive this titanic struggle, a yet greater threat to their sanity awaits.

I will have to speak of it next time. Another batch of demands have arrived from my fellow authors and I must go. Until next week!

1. People who have not worked on a scientific paper may not realise that this sentence constitutes an extremely dark and cynical joke, and I should probably apologise for making it. Anyone can understand what I mean if they think back to their school days, and those joyous moments when the teacher said, “You're going to work in groups.” It's just like that, but lasts for months. Or years.