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Determining authorship and inventorship are often sensitive issues, and they have led to many heated controversies. The NSF says that papers should be published with "authorship that accurately reflects the contributions of those involved."* A good guideline, but who decides?
Usually, the Principal Investigator has the first-line responsibility for determining who is listed as author of each publication or presentation from his/her group and for determining the order in which the authors are listed (a significant matter, since the order is often considered to rank the relative contributions of each co-author). Investigators are advised to:
- Follow the practices and customs of his/her field. In some fields, the Principal Investigator’s name traditionally comes first, while in others the custom is to list it last, but with an asterisk indicating that this is the author to whom inquiries may be addressed.
- Include, rather than exclude, co-authors whose contributions appear to be of borderline significance.
Researchers who believe they have been slighted may appeal the Principal Investigator’s authorship decisions to the university administration.
The co-inventors of a patent may not be the same people as the co-authors of a paper describing the patent. For example, the invention may have occurred before some of the co-authors even started working on the project. Since incorrectly listing inventors can jeopardize validity of a patent, and since inventorship is the subject of a complex body of patent law,** it is recommended that a patent attorney be consulted about inventorship at the time each patent is being prepared for filing.
*See III.d.2.
**Durham, A.L. "Patent Law Essentials," Quorum, Westport, CT; London, 1999. Pp. 41-44.
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