Collaboration is a key component of research. Original research papers with a single author are a vanishing breed, particularly in the life sciences. This makes it difficult to identify author contributions and acknowledgements, as well as to mine any data from the unstructured information. This information came from the international science journal Nature in an article, “Publishing: Credit where credit is due,” where our own Margie Hlava and her contribution to this issue was highlighted.
Developments in digital technology are making a difference in this area. Digital taxonomies can help identify contributor roles relatively easily in structured formats during the process of developing and publishing a paper. This was demonstrated in an experiment conducted by the authors of the Nature article. Read the article for their interesting perspectives.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
