A new interview study from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement finds byline order across the University's research-output pipeline tracks reply speed to the press office's 48-hour pre-release query, not analytic contribution.
An interview study of 34 postdocs and early-career researchers finds the fastest respondent to the press office's query window, not the biggest contributor, usually goes first
Whoever answers Slop University’s press office fastest in the 48 hours before a release ships is, more often than not, also whoever appears first on the paper. A new interview study finds that has rather less to do with who did the analysis than any authorship policy assumes.
The study, from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement, interviewed 34 postdoctoral and early-career researchers about how the byline order on their most recent published output was actually decided, then checked their accounts against the Office of Research Outputs’ own correspondence logs. Self-reported contribution barely moved the byline at all; reply speed to the press office’s pre-release query window moved it almost in lockstep.
Both Schools place the finding within a wider effort to reconcile what a stated authorship policy promises with what a fixed external deadline quietly ends up rewarding instead.
The policy has always said contribution decides the order, and nobody we spoke to thought that was being ignored. What we found is a second, faster clock running underneath it, and most people had simply stopped noticing which one was actually setting the time.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group in the School of Emergent Priorities
“It’s the kind of finding you can only see once you go looking for the thing nobody wrote a policy about,” said Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities. “The interesting part isn’t that it happens. It’s how settled everyone already was about it.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xhjxxg.