Credit where credit is due

摘要

Research today is rarely a one-person job. Original research papers with a single author are - particularly in the life sciences - a vanishing breed. Partly, the inflation of author numbers on papers has been driven by national research-assessment exercises. Partly, it is the emergence of big and collaborative science, assisted by technology, that is changing the research landscape. What we cannot tell easily by reading a paper is who did what. That is difficult to decipher by consulting the author lists, acknowledgements or contributions sections of most journals; and the unstructured information is difficult to text-mine.