Vol 144 No. 1, June 2015
EDITORIAL
On Co-authorship
More than eighty-seven percent of the 132 technical articles published in this journal from 2010 to 2014 feature two or more authors [1]. Scientific research is a social activity that involves deliberate, sustained, and constructive interactions of individuals who are painstakingly working towards the common objective of generating new scientific knowledge. Success in doing science has become critically dependent on productive collaborations of colleagues from different scientific disciplines or between senior researchers and their junior counterparts especially postdoctoral fellows and graduate students.
Interdisciplinary research collaborations are valuable in the continued advance of the scientific enterprise system since they tend to produce more accurate scientific solutions to the complex multidimensional challenges that the world is confronted with today. Collaborators would learn enormously from each other’s unique and often complementary perspectives of the problem at hand. Working with others who think differently is enriching particularly to young researchers who would acquire directly from senior co-investigators not only precious skills and time-tested techniques but also enduring lessons on the right way of doing science.
The publication of scientific findings in a peer-reviewed journal is commonly accepted as a tangible indicator of successful research collaboration. Determining who will be included as co-authors in an article is a delicate matter not just in big science projects that engage many collaborators from different institutions including foreign ones, but also in smaller in-house partnerships where participants have long known each other. . . . . read more
