The scientific community keeps on finding new ways to facilitate to judge scientists. The old-fashioned way of reading her papers, listening to her talks,  interviewing her for more than an hour, reading recommendation letters, and consulting colleagues personally takes way too much time.

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A problem I often encounter is deciding who to invite as co-authors. On one hand, you want to show appreciation to the people that helped you in the process of obtaining your results. On the other hand, generously adding authors will dilute the contribution of the people that made the largest contribution. In this post I would like to sketch a few hypothetical situations in which someone could be a co-author. The main goal here is to provoke some discussion on this subject, and learn about some good practices.

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Summary
In this post the ever increasing socializing with journal editors at conferences is critically discussed. Suggestions are put forward to make the social role of junior scientists more prominent at conferences  and preventing the successful scientists from taking it all.

Social dimension

Unique author identification is a longstanding issue in scientific publishing. Currently there are a number of systems under development that promise a variety of functionalities. I am not going to give here an extensive overview of this wide range of systems, an up to date article can be found here. While a universally recognized standard such as the ISO standard International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system will undoubtedly be useful as a way to categorize any type of authors, artists and scientists, the practical use of an author identifier will be strongly related to the availability of linked information such as lists of publications.

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