Authorship customs and citation counts

I promised some blog posts on some of the many distinguished women who have made classic contributions in psychiatric epidemiology, and I decided to start by reviewing work of several whose work I read when I was a postdoc, but never had the pleasure of a familiar acquaintance or a personal contact of any lasting duration.

For other reasons, Rema Lapouse came to the top of my queue this month, and I discovered a very clearly articulated description of some problems to be solved in psychiatric epidemiology, written by her in 1957, roughly 10 years after her studies at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

Lapouse, AJPH, 1957.

She died too young, in 1971, and I never met her, but her papers were recommended to me by Mort Kramer and Ernie Gruenberg when they were introducing me to this field.

I did meet Barbara Snell Dohrenwend in the late 1970s, and I believe it was when the American Psychopathological Association still was meeting in a small low ceiling mini-hall in the lower floors, possibly the basement of the old St. Moritz Hotel opposite the Pond in NYC Central Park. But this was no more than a passing acquaintance, and she died too young as well, in 1982.

To start with the end, here is BSN's obituary in the NYT:

BSN obituary


Here is a link to her collected archives at Columbia University: archives

I wanted to re-read her books with Bruce Dohrenwend so I started to track them down. The search led me to this article by Bruce, which provoked me to write a note about changing authorship customs, and the impact on science citation counts, etc.

Take a look below to see a 1970 handling of collaborators in a major field survey of the time, all of whom apparently did heavy lifting to produce the evidence reported here, but whose names do not appear in the authorship list. Instead, they appear in the acknowledgments. As such, their names would not be attached to the citation count for this article.

Contrast the modern custom of including the name of an author who has proofread the paper and done little else, or consulted on a statistical approach, or some minor assist of that type, but did not read the manuscript before it was submitted for publication.

I leave you to judge whether the modern custom is an improvement, but when I see colleagues on authorship lists for more than about 12 published papers per year, 1 per month, I always wonder whether there has been a full reading and thorough critique of each manuscript before (or after) submission, or whether there is some kind of courtesy authorship custom in motion. (Or whether they have no administrative and instructional or mentoring duties. Mentoring of new faculty members, especially, requires a senior author to help others to get their work polished up for publication, but deserves nothing more than the type of acknowledgment that Professor Dohrenwend models for us in his acknowledgements section. Even when an authorship position might be contemplated on the basis of many red pencil marks on the manuscript page, or even when help has been conveyed during the design or conduct phases of the work, the inclusion of the mentor in the authorship list can actually harm the early career colleague's reputation as an independently creative scientist. Mentors should be allowed to bask in reflected glory on many occasions, with the spotlight shining directly on the future of the field, and sometimes one should write solo author papers, even when many others contributed to the effort, with gracious acknowledgments as exemplified below, written by still-active Bruce Dohrenwend when he was some 46 years younger than he is now.)

Bruce Dohrenwend 1970