Develop co-authorship scoring system #23
Description
Each research project should have some kind of co-authorship system that participants agree to when joining the project. This will encourage transparency and help reduce friction between participants. (Not every project has to have publication as a goal, but in the event that the team would like to publish the work, it would be good to have this already in place).
See for example the system used by the plant ecology unit at the University of Sheffield, UK. The screenshot below is taken from Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers by Gábor L. Lövei.
In this system:
When a paper is ready for submission, all contributors are scored following the system in Box 6. Anyone with a score of over 25 gets co-authorship. The sequence is according to score rankings; scores below 25 are carried over to a subsequent paper.Authors can also be listed in alphabetical order if no sequence is desired, or authorship can be decided by the toss of a coin. In these cases, this fact is usually mentioned in a footnote on the first page of the manuscript. If two or more authors contributed equally to the paper, this can also be mentioned in a footnote.