This is actually a big problem.
I have seen senior researchers try to take research that should be it's own article and try to include it in their paper to take ownership. I have seen people who have done a lot of work on a project be not included in the authorship list and I have seen people taking a long time to publish something hoping the other author will give up and forget about it.
They say that research is a politics game. You need to make the right person happy with the smallest input possible. I wish I had the answer on ownership but I think its a system that may not be able to change because there is no one governing it. I think if you wanted it to change you would have to make the journals change.
Thank you so much for your thoughts! I agree we would need to change the journals, but they would have no incentive.
One idea I've discussed with colleagues is that we need to take some ideas from the entertainment industry and get more public interest into research. But this wont fix everything, and I'm not sure how to generate the amount of public interest that, for example, football has.
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You are absolutely right. It is so hard to get a good public interest on something like this.
Have you heard of the Heart Foundation Tick or something similar on food where the food product gets to display the tick if and only if it meets some predefined criteria and then this tick helps the customer know what is the best product to buy? Maybe a paper could have a similar thing. What you need though is a group of independent people to start, endorse it, regulate it and then also market it.
Imagine being the person behind something like that .... clearly I should be the first author if you publish a paper on it though haha!
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Haha yea let's write a paper! I call last author!
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But yeah the heart association tick-style endorsement would be cool to incorporate some kind of endorsement
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