Question about Authorship - Who is entitled to authorship? (Jun/03/2008 )

Hello Everyone!

I was hoping to get some second opinions regarding an authorship issue. I’ve tried to briefly outline the situation below (being as unbiased as possible):

Student A’s project involves PCR, however, PCR has never been done by anyone in the lab before, so over about a 6 month period, Student A learns how to do PCR.

Student B comes along and also needs to do PCR. So Student A teaches Student B general PCR techniques. Student A invests a total of 5-6 hours over a 2-week period teaching Student B about PCR.

Over the next 6 months Student B proceeds to do PCR for his/her own project with no further advice/involvement from Student A.

Having completed his/her project, Student B writes up a manuscript based on data generated from PCR and western blotting done by Student B alone.

This is my question: Is Student A entitled to any authorship of the manuscript?

Any opinions/comments are greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

Usually, no, student A shouldn't get authorship, they should however get an acknowledgment. Typically if someone has made a significant contribution to a paper (i.e. 1 or more figures or one or more sections of writing) then they should have authorship, but it depends a bit on where you are working and who with. Some people give everyone who is in the lab authorship, but others will restrict it to as few authors as possible.

Have a look at it this way:

If student B had learned PCR somewhere else and come into student A's lab, and then done whole heap of experiments and written them up, would student A be entitled to authorship because student A was also doing PCR? Should the person who taught student B PCR get authorship?

i'd say no... as you are teaching a technique rather than generating data.
perhaps student B could acknowledge them, but that would be as good as it gets.

however, it all depends on how good student A get's along with the supervisor. i had to include someone who didn't do anything towards my paper, just because.

V

Nope too, unless the approach to doing the experiment or the experimental design (e.g. primer design, cell treatments etc) was contributed by student A or the primers, stable cells, the sample etc was given by student A, then student A is entitled to authorship.

At the end of the day, it depends on the individual, some would like to have less authors in the paper while others prefer to have as many people in the paper as possible. Appallingly, some will omit the name of contributors, regardless.

Thank you so much for your replies!

Your comments were very helpful!

According to the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication",

Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

thank you Bioforum for the information on authorship.