Moving beyond first authorship: recognising individual contributions in academic teamwork

A threat to team science

Saunders was a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences’ expert working group on team science which published a report in March that called for better, more transparent reward systems.12 The report warned of a threat to “team science” if individual participants in biomedical research projects did not get the credit they deserved. It said that talented researchers could shun collaborations if their contributions were not recognised.

Saunders, who is dean of postgraduate research at Edinburgh University’s College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, says that the group wanted to ask the question, “Is it a problem for people or are we all being oversensitive and worrying unnecessarily?” The group consulted widely and discovered that there was “insecurity at all levels within the academic community.”

Researchers were broadly enthusiastic about collaborative working. But they were also concerned about their own futures, with consistent worries about career development, regardless of the size of the teams. “Recognition and reward in the academic medical biomedical community is very much about being able to get the next grant, being able to get the lecturer job, being able to be recognised as being a person of value in your community,” Saunders says.

Many research projects bring together people with diverse skills and academic backgrounds. “The person who might start the project, in the lab with a piece of tissue, will not be the person doing the clinical trial at the end, on the other hand along the way you need all these different skills,” she says. “It’s very important if you are a specialist that you are not perceived as only a specialist and not of value to the whole team.”

The report also highlights the need for researchers to have training in team skills, and opportunities for exposure to team science. “Senior people are concerned that, as they run big teams, they’re not necessarily skilled in managing different project aspects—they might be great leaders but not blessed with fantastic management skills,” Saunders says.

Getting something out of it

Many of the people contacted by the expert working group cited CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, as a good example of how contributions can be recognised. CERN participants benefit from being able to “get something out of it” along the way as part of their involvement—such as contributing to a publication, output, database, or giving a speech. “If they can capture it on their CV then that contribution is not undervalued,” says Saunders.

The working group found that, initially, publishers were the stakeholders most “lagging behind” in recognising the “culture change” needed to improve team science recognition. “The person who gets their name first on the journal paper is seen as being more valued than the person in the middle. This was the thing that bugged everybody right from the start,” she says. “When we talked to the publishers they said, ‘we can’t really do anything about that’.” But, she adds, over the two years of the group’s inquiry there came to be a “tremendous meeting of minds.”

Saunders says that research funders need to be looking more carefully at the interdisciplinary nature of research. “There was a lot of discussion about the assessment of research funding,” she says. “In straitened times when we’re all competing for the same pot of money it’s important that people get credit for what they’ve done so that they are not disadvantaged.”