Reaching out for scientific legacy: how to define authorship in academic publishing

摘要

Scientists devote their careers to the search for new discoveries, which turn into public knowledge once published as a scientific article or as an academic book. This exciting curiosity-driven search for knowledge enthuses most scientists and often occupies an exceptionally large part of a scientist's life. There are now many ways of publicising scientific discoveries, ranging from the print media to electronic publishing such as video documentary or voice podcast, all of which seek to preserve knowledge beyond human lifetime. Still, the principal way of preserving scientific discoveries for the future is the scientific article published in peer-reviewed a scientific journal (Kronick, 1990; Riisgard, 2000; Thatje, 2010). For the sake of this essay, I will hereafter refer to the peer reviewed scientific article as the "paper".