Corporate Authorship Posted on December 4, 2007 Jay Belsky (bio) talks about advantages and disadvantages of assigning corporate authorship.

I see more and more corporate authorship. There’s the Romanian Orphanage Research Group I think there is, and I just saw another one for translational research and I forget what it was. They work, although most of them look like they were what we would have called NACA papers, named author plus corporate author.

I think we see more of this because there are more collaborations, but one of the fact is it matters too is where people are in their careers. In some ways and in the American Child Care Study, we weren’t fighting for professional identities to such an extent not that that ever really goes away. People have egos. So that we could surrender primary authorship rights to a corporate entity without the same cost of it if you were a young professor trying to get tenure.

By the same token that strategy of doing corporate authorship had some costs for some people, because at some universities when it came time for further promotions or at least annual raises, they were dismissive of corporate authors where you just one of 20 in a footnote. Where at other universities the fact that that footnote brought in a lot of money for the university mattered more than something else. So those are factors that you don’t have entire control over.

I think universities have moved a long way toward accepting collaboration, but still they expect to see somebody with having some first authored papers, some middle author papers, and some end of paper author. It’s really that package on which somebody’s going to be evaluated whereas if everything’s corporate author, people start to wonder. And that’s why I’m not even sure I would advise enterprises to have as much corporate authorship as our group did. Again ours was necessary because we had so many partners. There were 10 teams on the one hand, and everybody shared overwhelmingly an interest in the primary questions.

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