They Deserve Authorship Posted on January 16, 2008 Darrell P. Wheeler (bio) asserts that if community participants are co-contributors to research data, they deserve acknowledgment.

Every conference presentation that we've done, we've always listed the community members in the authorship, not just in the acknowledgment.

Now that doesn't mean we just do it as a given. The community has to contribute. But as I said, they help us to develop the instruments. They help us with the interpretation of our analysis. We don't always let the community participants see the raw data. But as we're moving through the thematic extractions, through the identification of themes, through the interpretations of data runs, it's important for us to go back to those players and say, "Does this resonate with you in your real practice experience?"

And so in that way, they are co-contributors of the knowledge. They're helping to refine our understanding of the data that we think we're seeing or the interpretations that we're making. So they deserve to be listed as authors and not just as sideline participants in the process.

« Back to Article