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[blarg07]

Co-authors may be involved in design, development of the coding system, refinement of questions, and statistical analyses.

This is the slippery slope that can lead to inappropriate coauthorship - i.e. a creative, lower level person does all the word and the supervisor becomes an inappropriate coauthor.

I'm not sure why the above is a "slippery slope". The issues listed all seem like valid reasons for being a co-author.

Here is another issue - in my field it is common to be asked to write chapters for books which summarize our labs area of research (as well as related areas). What should be the rules for determining co-authorship on these chapters? My advisor's view is that if you had significant contributions to the research being discussed that came out of our lab, you will be a co-author somewhere on the chapter. Of course the more you contribute to the actual writing of the chapter, the further up on the author list you will be. I can see arguments for and against this practice, but I am curious as to what others think.

[coauthorship]

The slippery slope is indicated by the word "may".

[al_wallace]

The difficulty lies in the fact that to publish requires grants and to get grants requires publications. Anyone who claims that a PI can get grants without being a co-author on publications isn't dealing with the reality of sciences. If a PI isn't on the paper, this suggests that the post-doc is parasitizing the grant-writing of someone else yes (assuming the post-doc derives their salary from a grant and uses equipment and supplies generated by a grant)? Grant money doesn't magically appear from nowhere. Assuming that the PI conceived of the project, laid out the experimental design and analysis and had input into the writing and editing of the paper, why shouldn't they be an author?--particularly if they are a last author? This is the normal way of doing business isn't it?

If the post-doc is working on a project not on the grant that is unrelated to the PI's project BUT is getting paid from funds on the grant, then that is another ethical violation entirely since the post-doc shouldn't be paid off a grant if they aren't doing grant related work. This is really the crux of the problem. You have a PI that generated funding but not necessarily scholarly input for projects unrelated to a grant. We should keep our ethical violations separate (i.e. inappropriate use of grants versus inappropriate authorship).

By the way, ironically undergraduates that work on projects in my lab are first authors on the projects--and as such, I have been accused of inappropriately giving them authorship beyond what they deserve!

[coauthorship]

As for long publication lists, I would venture a guess that the average scientist that collects and processes their own data and writes it up would publish between 0.33 and 3 papers a year depending on the field and that is if they are doing nothing but this (no teaching, no committee work etc.).

There are people publishing many more papers than that and it is definitely questionable.  Please see http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/06/14/scientific_authorship/index.html  .