alue of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author. In

In literary criticism, for example, the traditional methods fordefining an author - or, rather, for determining the configurationof the author from existing texts - derive in large part from thoseused in the Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) theparticular texts in its possession. Modern criticism, in its desireto 'recover' the author from a work, employs devices stronglyreminiscent of Christian exegesis w

There are, nevertheless, transhistorical constants in therules that govern the construction of an author.

In addition, all these operations vary according to the periodand the form of discourse concerned. A 'philosopher' and a 'poet'are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of aneighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modernnovelist.

The third point concerning this 'author-function' is that it is notformed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourseto an individual. It results from a complex operation whose pur-pose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Un-doubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension aswe speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power, hisintentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Never-theless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as anauthor (or which comprise an individual as an author), are pro-jections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way ofhandling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extractas pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we prac-tise.

At the same time, however, 'literary' discourse was acceptableonly if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fictionwas obliged to state its author and the date, place and circumstanceof its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text de-pended on this information. If by accident or design a text waspresented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author.Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as,in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereigntyof the author. (

the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed whenscientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positionedwithin an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of estab-lished truths and methods of verification. Authentification no longerrequired reference to the individual who had produced them; therole of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and,where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denot

exts, however, that we now call 'scien-tific' (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness,the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthfulduring the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated.Statements on the order of 'Hippocrates said ..." or 'Pliny tellsus that . . .' were not merely formulas for an argument based onauthority, they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed whenscientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positionedwithin an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of estab-lished truths and methods of verification. Authentification no longerrequired reference to the individual who had produced them; therole of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and,where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote

Secondly, the 'author-function' is not universal or constant in alldiscourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of textshave not always required authors; there was a time when thosetexts which we now call 'literary' (stories, folk tales, epics, andtragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without anyquestion about the identity of their author. Their anonymity wasignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guaran-tee of their authenticity. T

First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of propertythey have become is of a particular type whose legal codificationwas accomplished some years ago. It is important to notice, aswell, that its status as property is historically secondary to thepenal code controlling its appropriation. Speeches and books wereassigned real authors, other than mythical or important religiousfigures, only when the author became subject to punishment andto the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. Inour culture - undoubtedly in others as well - discourse was notoriginally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situatedin a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, reli-gious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks longbefore it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values.But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strictcopyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenthand beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressiveproperties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the force-ful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the momenthe was accepted into the social order of property which governsour culture, was compensating for this new status by revivingthe older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of trans-gression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on anotherside, had been conferred the benefits of property

nsequently, we cansay that in our culture, the name of an author is a variable thataccompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a privateletter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; acontract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarlyan anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, buthe cannot be an author. In this sense, the function of an author isto characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certaindiscourses within a society

We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves fromthe interior of a discourse to the real person outside who producedit, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts -separating one from the other, defining their form, and character-izing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certaingroups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse withina society and culture. The author's name is not a function of aman's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach,among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of dis-course and their singular mode of existence. C

To learn, for example, that Pierre Dupont does not have blueeyes, does not live in Paris, and is not a doctor does not invalidatethe fact that the name, Pierre Dupont, continues to refer to thesame person; there has been no modification of the designation thatlinks the name to the person. With the name of an author, how-ever, the problems are far more complex. The disclosure thatShakespeare was not born in the house that tourists now visitwould not modify the functioning of the author's name, but if itwere proved that he had not written the sonnets that we attributeto him, this would constitute a significant change and affect themanner in which the author's name functions. Moreover, if weestablish that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon and that thesame author was responsible for both the works of Shakespeareand those of Bacon, we would have introduced a third type ofalteration which completely modifies the functioning of the author'sname. Consequently, the name of an author is not precisely a propername among others

The name of an author poses all the problems related to thecategory of the proper name. (Here, I am referring to the work ofJohn Searle,3 among others.) Obviously not a pure and simplereference, the proper name (and the author's name as well) hasother than indicative functions. It is more than a gesture, a fingerpointed at someone; it is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of adescription. When we say 'Aristotle', we are using a word thatmeans one or a series of definite descriptions of the type: 'theauthor of the Analytics', or 'the founder of ontology', and so forth.Furthermore, a proper name has other functions than that of sig-nification: when we discover that Rimbaud has not written LaChasse spirituelle, we cannot maintain that the meaning of theproper name or this author's name has been altered. The propername and the name of an author oscillate between the poles ofdescription and designation, and, granting that they are linked towhat they name, they are not totally determined either by theirdescriptive or designative functions. Yet - and it is here that thespecific difficulties attending an author's name appear - the linkbetween a proper name and the individual being named and the linkbetween an author's name and that which it names are not iso-morphous and do not function in the same way; and these dif-ferences require clarification.

It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the authorhas disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, weshould re-examine the empty space left by the author's disappear-ance, we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines,its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; weshould await the fluid functions released by this disappearance.In this context we can briefly consider the problems that ari

Another thesis has detained us from taking full measure of the 17author's disappearance. It avoids confronting the specific event thatmakes it possible and, in subtle ways, continues to preserve theexistence of the author. This is the notion of icriture. Strictlyspeaking,.it should allow us not only to circumvent references toan author, but to situate his recent absence. The conception oficriture, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the actof writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text,of an author's meaning; rather, it stands for a remarkably profoundattempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditionsof its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment

his problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wishto publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where dowe draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but canwe agree on what 'everything' means? We will, of course, includeeverything that Nietzsche himself published, along with the draftsof his works, his plans for aphorisms, his marginal notations andcorrections. But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, wefind a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or alaundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not? T

t,what of a context that questions the concept of a work? What, inshort, is the strange unit designated by the term, work? What isnecessary to its composition, if a work is not something writtenby a person called an 'author'? Difficulties arise on all sides if weraise the question in this way. If an individual is not an author,what are we to make of those things he has written or said, leftamong his papers or communicated to others? Is this not properlya work?

as been under-stood that the task of criticism is not to re-establish the ties betweenan author and his work or to reconstitute an author's thought andexperience through his works and, further, that criticism shouldconcern itself with the structures of a work, its architectonic forms,which are studied for their intrinsic and internal relationships. Y

his conception of aspoken or written narrative as a protection against death has beentransformed by our culture. Writing is now linked to sacrifice and tothe sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the selfthat does not require representation in books because it takes placein the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the dutyof creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to becomethe murderer of its author. Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka are obviousexamples of this reversal. In addition, we find the link betweenwriting and death manifested in the total effacement of the indi-vidual characteristics of the writer;

Beckett supplies a direction: 'What matter who's sp

For the purposes of this paper, I will set aside a sociohistoricalanalysis of the author as an individual and the numerous ques-tions that deserve attention in this context; how the author wasindividualized in a culture such as ours; the status we have giventhe author, for instance, when we began our research into authen-ticity and attribution; the systems of valorization in which he wasincluded; or the moment when the stories of heroes gave way toan author's biography; the conditions that fostered the formula-tion of the fundamental critical category of 'the man and his work'

en now, when we studythe history of a concept, a literary genre, or a branch of philo-sophy, these concerns assume a relatively weak and secondaryposition in relation to the solid and fundamental role of an authorand his works

hese questionshave determined my effort to situate comprehensive discursiveunits, such as 'natural history' or 'political economy', and to estab-lish the methods and instruments for delimiting, analysing, anddescribing these unities.

my objective in The Order of Things1 had been toanalyse verbal clusters as discursive layers which fall outside thefamiliar categories of a book, a work, or an author. But while Iconsidered 'natural history', the 'analysis of wealth', and 'politicaleconomy' in general terms, I neglected a similar analysis of theauthor and his works; it is perhaps due to this omission that Iemployed the names of authors throughout this book in a naiveand often crude fashion. I spoke of Buffon, Cuvier, Ricardo, andothers as well, but failed to realize that I had allowed their namesto function ambiguously. This

What Is an Author?

Searle's analyses

The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality

First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

What does it matter who is speaking

I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance; is outside it and antecedes it.

This paper examines the role played by Beckett's Texts for Nothing in the theoretical controversy concerning authorship that arose during the late 1960s. The implications of Foucault's quotation of Text 3 in his "What Is an Author?" create a canonical position for Beckett in a literature of anti-authorship, whilst the inclusion of Barthes's "The Death of the Author" alongside a recording of Text 8 in the avant-garde box magazine Aspen 5+6 facilitates a parallel reading which serves to underline certain submerged structures in Barthes's article, suggesting that the Barthesian author remains very much al

WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING/' SOMEONE SAID, "WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO IS SPEAKING": Beckett, Foucault, Barthes Alastair Hir

writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:' that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal "thing" he claims to "translate" is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum

Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of "painting" (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered

once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.

Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

"It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling" Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman?

THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR / ROLAND BARTHES

Drosophila muller f elements maintain a distinct set of genomic properties over 40 million years of evolution

writing behaviour. When do you write best? What parts of a paper do you find easiest/hardest to write? What are your biggest stumbling blocks? Perfectionism? Fear of criticism? What are the things that you’re best at? Putting together the Methods section? Creating understandable plots and tables? 

***By which I mean, it’s even in Wikipedia

Actually, I didn’t need Holmesian deductions to conclude that Aad et al. aren’t using a conventional definition of authorship. It’s widely known*** that at least two groups in experimental particle physics operate under the policy that every scientist or engineer working on a particular detector is an author on every paper arising from that detector’s data. (Two such detectors at the Large Hadron Collider were used in the Aad et al paper, so the author list is the union of the “ATLAS collaboration” and the “CMS collaboration”.) The result of this authorship policy, of course, is lots of “authorships” for everyone: for the easily searchable George Aad, for instance, over 400 since 2008.

Does mega-authorship threaten our concept of authorship in science? It would be easy, and fun, to write with a scandalized tone about how mega-authorship corrupts all that is good and decent about scientific publishing. But does it really matter? I think both yes and (mostly) no.

Does mega-authorship matter?

What to do when your coauthor doesn’t return your calls.

Of course, they will most likely all be co-authored pieces, but the significant point is that the REF rules, except in special cases, impose no penalty on genuinely co-authored work; they explicitly state that it is welcomed. In most cases, there is no disadvantage in submitting a co-authored item to the exercise (although there is some complication when co-authors submit in the same return); it is not as if it counts as half an output or less.

If done in good faith, four like-minded authors in the arts who agreed on a project of work could co-author four papers together and have the REF return of each sorted. If they are from different institutions, this would certainly be a more efficient way of meeting the framework's requirements. It might be viewed as a cynical exercise, but perhaps viewing it that way would be a sign that we haven't yet changed our mindset. If genuinely collaborative work became the norm, it wouldn't be viewed with suspicion.

If a major idea or approach came from another person, why not list that person as co-author and let them be equally generous in their turn where it applies?

he case for more collaborative work can be made. Indeed, most of us do it already, to some degree. We tend to discuss our ideas with colleagues and seek trusted opinions. We present talks at conferences and seminars, and use the feedback to develop ideas before publication. We solicit comments on drafts. Colleagues share a research environment that, if it is effective, contributes to the quality of all output. Yet when the work appears, the standard model is still sole ownership. A colleague could have given a lot of input, discussing ideas or providing comments on early drafts, yet their accepted reward is only to appear in the list of acknowledgements. This seems a paltry return on what can be a considerable amount of effort, an effort that is obviously a degree of collaboration. Perhaps one tries to mitigate the paltry reward by extracting a reciprocal amount of uncredited assistance in return.

Typically, authors can write something better together than they could have produced alone.

Combination acts

However, it seems that the academy is already growing wise to the nature of these mass-authored papers. This year, for the first time, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings will exclude any papers that have more than 1,000 authors, as they are considered to be “so freakish that they have the potential to distort the global scientific landscape”.

Is mass authorship destroying the credibility of papers?

A Crowd-authoring Project on theScholarship of Educational Technology

Academia has long experienced a ‘core–periphery’dichotomy (to borrow terminology from Wallerstein,1974), with a one-way influence from the core to theperiphery. The core refers to the well-respected nativeEnglish-speaking departments, faculties and/or jour-nals, whereas the periphery refers to researchers outsideof the native English-speaking domain

The trend of increasingly long author lists on research papers is clearly getting out of hand. In addition to being impractical, it is also threatening to the entire system in which academic work is rewarded. Radical reform is needed. One way forward could be to completely remove authors on papers and replace them with project names.

Long lists are eroding the value of being a scientific author

What Is The Primordial Reference For The Phrase 'Publish Or Perish'?

Did you know“Publish or perish” has been worrying researchers for 60 years Publish. Or. Perish. These three little words describe the constant pressure on academics to publish their research and make their name. But this is not a new phenomenon; these three words have been keeping researchers awake for over 60 years. The phrase was coined in 1950 by Kimball C. Atwood III, a geneticist at Columbia University (1). Although never written down, it struck a chord with researchers, and, so legend has it, it was just a month before the phrase found its way back to Atwood, in an address given by a visiting lecturer. Despite the long history of “Publish or Perish”, it is likely to ring around the halls of the world’s research institutes as long as competition among researchers for limited funds and positions continues to intensify. Reference (1) Sojka, R.E. and Mayland, H.F. (1991) Driving Science With One Eye On the Peer Review Mirror

Despite opinions to the contrary, these data suggest that there has been no apparent increase in overall productivity per active author over the last decade. Instead, authors are using their authorship potential more wisely by becoming more collaborative in the way they work, which is driving an apparent inflation in each author’s productivity as well as author bylines. Instead, the underlying driver of the volume increase in articles published is simply the introduction of new entrants/authors into the market. That is not surprising, as the total population of researchers globally continues to rise every year, and they become increasingly subject to the principles of "publish or perish": and so the cycle continues.

This rise in ‘fractional authorship’ (the claiming of credit for authorship of a published articles by more than one individual) is most likely driven by research collaboration, and is an efficient mechanism by which each author can increase their apparent productivity from the same underlying research contributions (i.e. articles per unique author) of 0.56 articles per unique author per year.

Over the past ten years or so, the number of authorships per unique author (2.31 in 2013) has increased while the number of articles per unique author (0.56 in 2013) has declined (see Figure 2),

Results of our analysis show that there has been a consistent growth in the number of articles published over the past decade; from 1.3 million in 2003 to 2.4 million in 2013 (see Figure 1). At the same time, the number of authorships has increased at a far greater rate from 4.6 million in 2003 to 10 million in 2013.

The phenomenon has become a focus of academic research itself, as a search for the phrase in Scopus retrieved 305 documents published on the topic from 1962 to date. On average, more than 20 articles per year were published on the topic over the past 5 years (2009 – 2013), with 37 articles alone published in 2013.

A 1996 article by Eugene Garfield (3) traces the phrase back to at least 1942,

Publish or perish? The rise of the fractional author…

Some researchers attribute the phrase to Kimball C. Atwood III, who is said to have coined the phrase in 1950 (

I often use a supplemental evaluation form at the end of the term. There are two competing functions of the evaluation. The first is to give you feedback for course improvement, and the second is to assess performance. What the students might think is constructive feedback might be seen as a negative critique by those not in the classroom. It’s in our interest to separate those two functions onto separate pieces of paper. Before we went digital, I used to hold up the university form and say: “This form [holding up the scantron] is being used by the school as a referendum on my continued employment. I won’t be able to access these forms until after the next semester already starts, so they won’t help me out that much.” Then I held up another piece of paper [an evaluation I wrote with specific questions about the course] and said, “This one is constructive feedback about what you liked and didn’t like about the course. If you have criticisms of the course that you want me to see, but don’t think that my bosses need to see them, then this is the place to do it. Note that this form has specific questions about our readings, homework, tests and lessons. I’m just collecting these for myself, and I’d prefer if you don’t put your names on them.” I find that students are far more likely to evaluate my teaching in broad strokes in the university form when I use this approach, and there are fewer little nitpicky negative comments.

What’s more interesting, I think, is similarities between ecology/evolutionary biology and the humanities. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out many years ago that some lines of scientific inquiry were more like historical research than “real” science. That idea has stayed with me throughout my career, which I think is why I’ve such an interest in how a historical perspective informs our present day understanding of the subject.

The PDF of the paper gives a bit of a clue as to what’s going one. The author list is more modest on the title page, which lists the authors as, “Wilson Leung and Participating Students and Faculty of the Genomics Education Partnership.” So a lot of these authors are students who took a class, and probably completed part of the analysis as a course assignment.

When does authorship stop meaning anything useful?

In his blog post, Faulkes suggests a new rule: “If the number of authors on your paper can be measured in ‘kiloauthors’, having your name on the paper will not count for tenure and promotion purposes.”

Zen Faulkes, an invertebrate neuroethologist at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, questions on his blog whether every person made enough of a contribution to be credited as an author.

Fruit-fly paper has 1,000 authors

ome kind of ontolog-ical reassessment of authorship is called for to ensure thatauthority, credit, and accountability, currently apportionedin confused fashion across authors, acknowledgees and con-tributors, are henceforth distributed appropriately, parsimo-niously, and unambiguously. I

what is implied by a byline in thesecases is typically a very precise, often specialized input to acomplex, multidisciplinary project. The classical idea ofauthorship cannot credibly accommodate the legions ofcoworkers associated with large-scale collaboration, nor canit adequately reflect “the epistemic role of support person-nel” in the conduct of science (Shapin, 1995, p. 359).

day’sbiomedical journal article is the progeny of occasionallymassive collaborations, the individual members of whichmay have minimal involvement in the fashioning of theliterary end-product itself, with the act of writing beingdelegated to a subgroup or designated spokespersons. I

he “modern scriptor” (Bar-thes, 1977, p. 146) is no longer the sole conceiver, fabrica-tor, and owner of the published article.

hmed, Maurana, Engle,Uddin, & Glaus (1997)

In biomedicine, authorship has irrevocably shed some ofits craft associations:

However, a diverse body of work on thesocially situated nature of scientific communication alreadyexists which points the way. This ranges from Crane’s(1969) pioneering analyses of invisible colleges throughLatour and Woolgar’s (1979) classic study of laboratory lifeat the Salk Institute to Traweek’s (1992) richly texturedethnography of the HEP community. In addition, the workof Schatz and colleagues on the Worm Community Systemproject, which was designed to capture the full range ofknowledge, formal and informal, of the community of mo-lecular biologists who study the nematode worm C. elegans(see: http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/projects/wcs/index.html)can provide useful insights; so, too, research into the mate-rial practices and social interactions of scientists working incollaboratories, such as the Upper Atmospheric ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/crew/Research/resrch08.htm) or the Space, Physics & Aeronomy ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/sparc/) at theUniversity of Michigan

is wiseto avoid generalizations and to concentrate instead on show-ing how interactions between coworkers, specifically theorchestration of information exchange and coauthorship, aregrounded in local culture.

iomedical collaborations are moreheterogeneous and socially diffuse in character and do notappear to have the same degree of multilayered, internalreview as HEP research collaborations. T

TheHEP research community is thus characterized by highlevels of internal scrutiny, mutual trust—witness, for in-stance, the institutionalized practice of relying upon, andciting, preprints—and peer tracking, such that it is notsusceptible to systematic fraud. Contrary

The answer probably has to do with the relative intensityof socialization and oral communication (Traweek, 1992,pp. 120 –123), along with the character of the organizationalstructures and value systems, which define collaborations inlarge-scale, high-energy physics and biomedical research.

ights (1, 3, 5) are summed to(a) estimate each individual’s overall contribution, whichcan range from 1–35 (735 being the maximum possiblescore), and (b) determine the sequence in which coauthors’names are listed on the resultant publication.

owever, it isimportant to distinguish between generic job categories andthe specification of tasks performed; the contributorshipmodel is designed to record each individual’s actual input(e.g., experimental design, data collection, statistical analy-sis, final article revision), not job title (e.g., coprincipalinvestigator, technician, systems analyst), since the lattermay on occasion mask or inflate the former (Stern, 2000).

The standard model accepts that authorship is linkedinextricably to writing. But writing is no longer a necessarycondition of coauthorship in certain cases. Thus, an alter-native to authorship is required to accommodate the manyother contributions that shape the published byproducts ofcollaborative activity, be they research reports, journal ar-ticles, conference papers, or technical reports. C

To date, more than 500 journals have adopted theICMJE’s (1997) principles of authorship as laid out in the5th edition of theUniform Requirements for ManuscriptsSubmitted to Biomedical Journals(Klein, 1999; Stern,2000). According to these concrete guidelines, candidateauthors must satisfy three conditions. They must make:“. . . substantial contributions to (a) conception and design,or analysis and interpretation of data; and to (b) drafting thearticle or revising it critically for important intellectualcontent; and on (c) final approval of the version to bepublished.” Laudable though these guidelines are, it is un-likely that they will solve the problem. A study by Hoen etal. (1998) in the Netherlands found that authors and theircoauthors did not always agree with one another’s assess-ments that the ICMJE criteria had been met. In the UK,Bhopal et al.’s (1997) survey of medical researchers dis-covered that, although most respondents concurred with thethree criteria (more than 80% in each case), a majority(62%) did not feel that all three conditions should have to besatisfied to warrant author status. F

Rennie, Yank, andEmanuel (1997) that the distinction between the two modesof credit allocation is inherently artificial. Consequently,they have argued for explicit description of all individualcontributions as a means of eliminating ambiguity. Such aproposal would remove both authorship and acknowledg-ment from the frame, a really quite significant break withscholarly publishing tradition. This alternative amounts to aradical model of authorship attribution in contrast to thestandard model

he problem with arbitrary capping, whetherof authors or acknowledgees of one kind or another, is thatsome individuals’ potentially important contributions, bethey clinical investigators (Carbone, 1992) or telescopeoperators (Cronin, 1995), may be erased. This could, con-ceivably, have negative downstream implications in termsof remuneration and promotion prospects for those—the“invisible technicians” (Shapin, 1995, p. 355)—whose ef-forts have been withheld from the public ledger. It mightalso reduce, in line with theories of reciprocal altruism(Nowak & Sigmund, 2000), potential collaborators’ will-ingness to ‘donate’ their services.

Some journals place a limit on the numberof coauthors; for example, theDutch Journal of Medicinedoes not publish articles with more than six authors (Hoenet al., 1998).

Kassirer and Angell (1991, p. 1511)of theNew England Journal of Medicinewere bemoaningnot only “ambiguous authorship” but “lengthy acknowledg-ments,” inflated by the inclusion of “everybody who hadanything to do with the study, including those who weremerely carrying out their jobs, such as technicians.”

ocial significance of acknowledg-ment practices in a variety of disciplines, including astron-omy (Verner, 1993), genetics (McCain, 1991), biology(Heffner, 1981), chemistry (Heffner, 1981), psychology(Heffner, 1981; Cronin, 1995), information science (Cronin,1995, 2001), sociology (Patel, 1973; Cronin, 1995), politi-cal science (Heffner, 1981), and philosophy (Cronin, 1995).

Bazerman (1984, 1988) has chronicled the evolutionof the acknowledgment during the 19th and 20th centuriesin the journal literature of experimental physics, showinghow it became, to paraphrase Grafton (1997, p. 233), anintegral part of the rhetoric of narration and annotation

“sub-authorship collaboration” (Patel, 1973, p. 81),

twe should not assume too much in terms of common un-derstandings: the dividing line between the two classifica-tions, author and acknowledgee, is neither universally ap-preciated nor consistently applied. Cronin (1995, pp. 85–86), for instance, has shown that interpretative disputes arenot uncommon, and that some researchers feel that theyhave been denied their just deserts by being downgradedfrom coauthor to acknowledgee. A

The explosion of coauthorship naturally raises the ques-tion why authorial surplus could not be accommodated inthe acknowledgment sections that accompany the great ma-jority of scientific articles.

I have chosen not to hide behind the cloak of anonymity, orbypass the rigors of peer review by posting a version of thispaper on my Web site;

ut before considering theICMJE’s guidelines for authorship, it may be instructive toreflect on the role of acknowledgments in the primarycommunication process, and the relationship between au-thorship and acknowledgment.

ublinCore and REACH (Record Export for Art and CulturalHeritage) prefer the terms ‘creator’ and ‘maker’ to the moretraditional ‘author’ (Baca, 1998). T

In rare cases, a questionable, published paper may acquire“orphan” status (Rennie & Flanagin, 1994, p. 469), as allconcerned try to wash their hands of it, invoking hyperlaborspecialization as grounds for exoneration. Such a scenario isinconceivable under the standard model, where authorshipand accountability are isomorphic. But when authorship/ownership of a study is distributed across multiple contrib-utors, many of whom may have zero or weak relation-ships—whether personal or institutional—with their myriadcoworkers (Katz & Martin, 1997), the practical (i.e., en-forceable) allocation of accountability may pose intractableproblems

Additionally, Ducor (2000) investigated asmall set of patents in molecular biology and their concom-itant publications in the scientific literature. Of the 40patent-article pairs examined, all but two listed more au-thors than inventors, which raises interesting questionsabout the relative stringency of the criteria employed forconferring authorship and inventorship.

Slone (1996), in a survey of “major research” articlespublished in theAmerican Journal of Roentgenology, foundthat undeserved coauthorship rose from 9% on papers withthree coauthors to 30% on papers with more than six coau-thors.

Flanagin et al.(1998) developed a multivariate logistic regression model totest the hypothesis that coauthored articles (operationalizedas papers with six or more authors) were increasing at a rategreater than would be expected when confounding vari-ables, such as the number of centers, were taken into ac-count. They found that 19% of original research reports hadhonorific authors, individuals who were garnering phantomfodder for their curricula vitae. They also discovered that11% of articles had ghost authors, which means that quite afew individuals were not receiving due credit for theircreative or material contributions to the research process—“the ghostly inferred hosts of unnamed actors who shiftedinstruments about and exerted their muscular labor’(Shapin, 1995, p. 379). Their findings, based on surveys ofcorresponding authors, are in keeping with other estimatesof honorific authorship in the biomedical literature.

here is com-pelling evidence that many individuals receive unwarrantedcoauthor status (variously referred to as ‘guest’, ‘gift,’ or‘surprise’ authorship) while others are denied legitimatelyearned author status (‘ghost’ authorship). As Slone (1996, p.578) notes, authorship “cannot be conferred but must beearned.” I

ichard Horton (1998, p. 688) editor ofThe Lancet, speaks, in fact, of “the shattered system ofacademic reward and its symptom, broken rules of author-ship,” a view which seems neither extreme nor marginaljudging by the tenor of the debate being conducted in thepages of the global biomedical literature (Klein & Moser-Veillon, 1999)

eceiving credit under false pretenses,are cause for grave concern (Anderson, 1991).

mass of editorial commentary andcorrespondence in the letters pages of major journals (e.g.,Constantian, 1999; Rennie, Yank, & Emanuel, 1997). Ho

norificauthorship and data integrity, seem to be of especial concernto the biomedical community, given widespread media cov-erage of, and speculation about, fraudulent practice, theeffects of which, in both career and personal terms, can bedevastating (e.g., Kevles, 1998).

ow, for instance, should a promotion andtenure committee view the contribution of the 99th listedauthor on a particle physics paper or the 36th author on agenome sequencing study? What may seem to constitute aminiscule portion of a single journal article may, in fact,have consumed a significant amount of that individual’sprofessional time and energy. T

owever, multipleauthorship and hyperauthorship are not problematized byphysicists as they are by the biomedical community.

t this point, the notion of authorship,literally interpreted, is effectively rendered meaningless.

ennieand Yank (1998, p. 829), when “the number of collaboratorsgrows arithmetically, it becomes exponentially harder toaffix responsibility.”

he practice of promiscuous coauthor-ship puts considerable stress on this tried and tested model.

Under the standard model, the rights and responsibilitiesof authorship are clearly apprehended by all parties: authors,editors, referees, and readers. In appending my name to thisarticle I am nailing my colors to mast; if the article attractscritical approval, is discussed, quoted, and, in due course,cited in the scholarly literature, I shall be happy to bank thesymbolic capital which accrues to me as author and origi-nator. If the paper is challenged because of exiguity oftheoretical, historical, or empirical heft, I shall simply haveto face the music: there are no coauthors to help deflectcriticism. Likewise, if I am challenged for drawing toosparingly, selectively, or generously on the ideas and workof others, I understand the possible consequences. However,I have chosen not to hide behind the cloak of anonymity, orbypass the rigors of peer review by posting a version of thispaper on my Web site; rather, I want to publicize my ideasamong my peers, and the best way to do that, and signify mytrustworthiness, is to pursue publication in an accreditedforum. As a serial author, I am fully cognizant of the rightsand responsibilities of authorship. I understand the norms ofscholarly publishing, and I am aware of the sanctions thatmay be invoked if infractions occur. Should the argumentsin this paper prove flawed, no one but myself is to blame,and that includes those whom I have named in the acknowl-edgments section. If the paper attracts attention, I shall behappy to bask in the glow.

e need toconsider how multiple authorship, in extremis—what I havechosen to term ‘hyperauthorship’— undermines commonlyheld assumptions about the nature and ethical entailments ofauthorship, and how, in exceptional cases, it can lead tofundamental questions about the integrity of the researchcommunity as a whole. Unfortunately, little effort is madein the biomedical literature to distinguish systematicallybetween what might be termed acceptable levels of multipleauthorship and unacceptable levels of hyperauthorship.Studies of coauthorship trends, as will become clear,

n the realm of periodical publications,the sovereignty of the standard model is being most hotlycontested in biomedical research fields, where intense levelsof professional collaboration and coauthorship are common-place (Croll, 1984; Rennie & Flanagin, 1994; Rennie, Yank,& Emanuel, 1997; Rennie & Yank, 1998; King, 2000).Proposals for reform, which seek to retire the concept ofauthorship and replace it with a scheme for the allocation ofspecific, task- or job-related credits (e.g., Squires, 1996;Smith, 1997) are not only being debated by editors andothers, but are being adopted by leading scientific journal

Rennie’s and Flanagin’s (1994, p. 469) beguilingly simplequestion: “. . . how many people can wield one pen?” S

he standard model of scholarly publishing, inwhich it is assumed that a work is written by an author, t

Some medical commentators (Rennie, Yank, &Emanuel, 1997, p. 582) have advocated abandoning theconcept of author altogether in favor of ‘contributors’ and‘guarantors,’ thereby freeing us “from the historical andemotional connotations of authorship.”

ouble-blind) peer review became an established component of thepost-war scientific bureaucracy (Chubin & Hackett, 1990,pp. 19 –24)

e well-estab-lished “conventions of impersonality” in scientific writing(Hyland, 1999, p. 355) and resulting in the erasure of styl

0authors—a leading indicator of hyperauthorship?—in-creased from 1 in 1981 to 182 in 1994 (McDonald, 1995)and that the average number of authors per paper in theScience Citation Index (SCI)increased from 1.83 in 1955 to3.9 in 1999 (personal communication with Helen Atkins,Director of Database Development, Institute for ScientificInformation, Philadelphia, 2000). To use a couple of ran-dom examples: a 1997 article inNature(cited almost 600times since then) on the genome sequence of a bacteriumhas 151 coauthors, drawn from dozens of research labora-tories scattered across twelve countries (Kunst et al., 1997).A recent (Daily et al., 2000). two-page article inScienceonthe economic value of ecosystems has no fewer than 17authors and five acknowledgees. I

s not still common prac-tice in fields such as philosophy or women’s studies (Cro-nin, Davenport, & Martinson, 1997). By way of example,Endersby (1996) has analyzed trends in, and reasons for,collaboration and multiple authorship in the social sciences.Patel (1973) has described the growth of coauthorship insociological journals for the period 1895 to 1965. Bird(1997) has found evidence of coauthorship growth in theliterature of marine mammal science (1985–1993), whileKoehler et al. (1999) found that the average number ofauthors per article in theJournal of the American Society forInformation Science(previouslyAmerican Documentation)rose from approximately 1.2 in the 1950s to 1.8 in the1990s

n a sample of 2,101 scientificpapers published between 1665 and 1800, Beaver andRosen found that 2.2% described collaborative work. No-table was the degree of joint authorship in astronomy,especially in situations where scientists were dependentupon observational data.

French science was much more profession-alized and institutionalized than was the case in either of theother European powers. Specifically, they found that morethan half of all the coauthored scientific articles in theirhistoric sample had been produced by French scientists.

Beaver and Rosen (1978) have shown how the differentialrates of scientific institutionalization in France, England,and Germany are mirrored in the relative output of coau-thored papers.

iking increase inrates of coauthorship, though the latter is only a partialindicator of the former: coauthorship and collaboration arenot coextensive (Katz & Martin, 1997, p. 1). This trend ismost noticeable in experimental high-energy physics(HEP), with its often very large teams and highly sophisti-cated collaborations (Kling & McKim, 2000). A similartrend, dating from the 1990s, can be seen in the biomedicalresearch literature, particularly with regard to publicationsarising from large, multi-institutional clinical trials (Rennie,Yank, & Emanuel, 1997; Horton, 1998). H

In some domains, path-breaking work is nec-essarily the outcome of collaborative activity rather thanindividualistic scholarship, a fact reflected in the modestproportion of federal research funds which is allocated toindividual investigators rather than teams. Collaborationsare a necessary feature of much, though by no means all,contemporary scientific research.

After World War II, collaboration became a defin-ing feature of ‘big science’ (Bordons & Gomez, 2000;Cronin, 1995, pp. 4 –13; Katz & Martin, 1997).

ncidentally, parallel,though not quite so dramatic, growth has been observed inthe number of individuals being formally acknowledged inscholarly journals for their multifarious contributions: whathas become known as subauthorship collaboration (Patel,1973; Heffner, 1979, 1981; Cronin, 1995, Cronin,2001)—an important, if underappreciated, indicator of in-formal scientific collaboration

o some extent, authorship has becomea collective activity, with numerous coauthors competingfor the byline, some of whom may not have written, strictlyspeaking, a single word of the associated work (McDonald,1995; Kassirer & Angell, 1991).

n general terms, the lone authorstereotype ignores the fact that a great deal of the scholarlyliterature is the product of a “socio-technical production andcommunications network” (Kling, McKim, Fortuna, &King, 1999),

The standard model of scholarly publishing assumes awork written by an author. There is typically a single authorwho receives full credit for theopusin question. By thesame token, the named author is held accountable for allclaims made in the text, excluding those attributed to othersvia citations. The appropriation of credit and allocation ofresponsibility thus go hand-in-hand, which makes for fairlystraightforward social accounting. The ethically informed,lone scholar has long been a popular figure, in both fact andscholarly mythology. Historically, authorship has beenviewed as a solitary profession, such that “when we picturewriting we see a solitary writer” (Brodkey, 1987, p. 55). Butthat model, as Price (1963) recognized almost three decadesago, is anachronistic as far as the great majority of contem-porary scientific, and much social scientific and humanistic,publishing is concerned.

here reputation, career suc-cess, and, ultimately, remuneration are tightly coupled withpublication salience and citation (Cronin, 1996), t

hapin (1995,p. 178) notes in his brilliant study of trust in 17th-centuryEnglish science,

As Katzen (1980, p. 191) notes in heranalysis of early volumes of thePhilosophical Transac-tions:. . . no attempt is made to give prominence to the author ofthe article . . . there is generally no reference at all to theauthor in the heading that signals a new communication. Ifthe author is referred to in the title, it is likely to be in anoblique form . . . we are at the threshold between anony-mous and eponymous authorship

s Rennie and Flanagin(1994) remind us, there is no standard method for determin-ing order, nor any universalistic criteria for conferring au-thorship status:

much has changedin terms of the ways, both instrumental and stylistic, inwhich scientists communicate the results of their research totheir peer communities. However, in the intervening 300-plus years, certain symbolic and rhetorical practices, nota-bly the assertion and defense of authorship, and all thepresumptive rights associated therewith, have remainedcenter stage. In the 17th century, the business of authorship,as the business of science itself, was much less complicatedand contentious than today—which is not to say that prioritydisputes were unheard of, that egos were never bruised, orthat “the bauble fame” did not come into play in earliertimes.

etter writing continued as a medium for theinformal exchange of information and for requesting fellowscientists to replicate experiments (Manten, 1980, p. 8).

Before the precursors of today’s scholarly journals es-tablished themselves in the second half of the 17th century,scientists communicated via letters.

But while the traditional model of authorship persists, mostnoticeably in the humanities, it is no longer the sole ordominant model in certain scientific specialties.

uthorship (and therecognition that flows therefrom) is the undisputed coin ofthe realm in academia: it embodies the enterprise of schol-arship (Bourdieu, 1991; Cronin, 1984, 2000; Franck, 1999

o state the obvious, public affirmation of au-thorship is absolutely central to the operation of the aca-demic reward system, whether one is a classicist,sociologist, or experimental physicist.

Foucault,1977,p.125

Manguel(1997,pp.182–183)

Thisarticle(a)beginswithabrief,historicaloverviewofscholarlypublishing,focusingontheroleoftheauthorandtheconstitutionoftrustinscientificcommunication;(b)offersanimpressionisticsurveyandanalysisofrecentdevelop-mentsinthebiomedicalliterature;(c)explorestheextenttowhichdeviantpublishingpracticesinbiomedicalpublishingareafunctionofsociocognitiveandstructuralcharacteris-ticsofthedisciplinebycomparingbiomedicinewithhighenergyphysics,theonlyotherfieldwhichappearstoexhibitcomparablehyperauthorshiptendencies;and(d)assessestheextenttowhichcurrenttrendsinbiomedicalcommuni-cationmaybeaharbingerofdevelopmentsinotherdisci-plines

aproposaltoreplaceauthorsentirelywithlistsofcontributors(Rennie,Yank,&Eman-uel,1997)

thecentralissueisnotjustoneofmultipleauthorship,buttointroduceaneologismofhyperauthorship—

scaleofthephenomenonandassociatedethicalabuseshaveprovedtobesingularlyproblematicinthebiomedicaldo-main(e.g.,Houston&Moher,1996

Inthebiomedicalresearchcommunity,multipleauthorshiphasincreasedtosuchanextentthatthetrustworthinessofthescientificcom-municationsystemhasbeencalledintoquestion.Doc-umentedabuses,suchashonorificauthorship,havese-riousimplicationsintermsoftheacknowledgmentofauthority,allocationofcredit,andassigningofaccount-ability.Withinthebiomedicalworldithasbeenproposedthatauthorsbereplacedbylistsofcontributors(theradicalmodel),whosespecificinputstoagivenstudywouldberecordedunambiguously.Thewiderimplica-tionsofthe‘hyperauthorship’phenomenonforscholarlypublicationareconsidered.

lphabetization through weightedlisting to reverse seniority (e.g., Spiegel & Keith-Spiegel,1970; Riesenberg & Lundberg, 1990).

Following the 2004 report on pravastatin and a 2005 paper on tuberculosis among European patients receiving anti-HIV therapy (a report with “only” 859 authors), high-energy physics subsequently moved in to displace biomedicine in securing the upper tiers of science’s most mega-authored papers. The physics upsurge was striking. In 2010, Thomson Reuters indexed 16 papers in the main field of Physics with more than 1,000 authors each; in 2011, the figure was 120 such papers, with 44 Physics papers listing more than 3,000 authors.

For a more specific look at “hyperauthored” papers, Graph 3 covers 1992 through 2011 and tracks each year’s single paper with the highest author count. In the graph, the line sticks fairly close to the 500-author mark for the first decade, with no single paper exceeding 1,000 authors until 2004, when the threshold was resoundingly surpassed. As ScienceWatch reported five years ago, the paper in question was a study from Circulation Journal examining the efficacy of pravastatin in Japanese subjects with mildly elevated cholesterol levels; the published report includes more than 2,400 authors.

Multiauthor Papers: Onward and Upward

n fact, all the groupings in Graph 1 display a notable surge from 2010 onward. This is particularly striking on the bottom-most line denoting 1,000 or more authors. Aside from a few blips through 2009, this line was flat—until 2010, when Thomson Reuters indexed 17 papers with author counts above 1,000. The next year, 2011, this number increased nearly 10-fold, with more than 140 papers registering above the 1,000-author mark.

Observation of the rare Bs0 →µ+µ− decay from the combined analysis of CMS and LHCb data

Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mi>p</mi><mi>p</mi></math> Collisions at s√=7<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><msqrt><mi>s</mi></msqrt><mo>=</mo><mn>7</mn></math> and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments

Robert Garisto, an editor of Physical Review Letters, says that publishing the paper presented challenges above and beyond the already Sisyphean task of dealing with teams that have thousands of members. “The biggest problem was merging the author lists from two collaborations with their own slightly different styles,” Garisto says. “I was impressed at how well the pair of huge collaborations worked together in responding to referee and editorial comments,” he adds.

Physics paper sets record with more than 5,000 authors

Research Biologist Coins Term 'Kilo-Author' For Scientific Journal Articles

Am I getting, you know, recognition, you know? So if you're one of a thousand in a paper, you still have a paper to your name versus somebody like myself, who - I write a lot of papers just on my own. And I do everything by myself, and, you know, we both end up with one paper. SIEGEL: Of course, when one sees a thousand authors credited for a single article, it's - you know, it's hard to imagine a thousand people agreeing on a birthday card not to mention a scientific article.

Oh, yeah. It's certainly not as though - and you know that they didn't all contribute the same, right? It's not as though that everybody got five words and wrote five words out of the paper.

The rise of mass authorship and fractional authorship: Do too many cooks spoil the broth?

are that an author should have made substantial contributions to the study as well as to drafting the work, and should be able to identify all co-authors on a study and their contribution.

Earlier this year, a paper on rare particle decay published in Nature listed so many co-authors—about 2,700—that the journal announced it wouldn’t have room for them all in its print editions

His scientific renown is a tribute to alphabetical order

How Many Scientists Does It Take to Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands

When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction

Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehensio

There is also a stream of research related to online versus paper surveys of faculty perfor-mance. In general, online ratings were found to be about the same as paper ratings. Theonline ratings were, if anything, slightly higher than paper ratings (Carini et al. 2003). Otherresearchers found that the properties of student ratings were similar for both paper andonline responses (Hardy 2003; McGhee and Lowell 2003). Even though there was a slightlylower response rate for online as opposed to paper ratings, researchers conclude that withacceptance of online ratings by students and faculty, appreciation of the advantages of onlineratings (thoughtful feedback, convenience and user-friendliness) and the development ofonline infrastructure, this response difference will diminish (Ballantyne 2003; Johnson2003)

Does ratemyprofessor.com really rate my professor?

RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations

A recent organization of the experimental literature (Deci 8z Ryan, in press) revealed that events which are experienced as supporting autonomy and promoting or signifying competence-thus facilitating an internal perceived locus of causality and perceived competence-tend to increase intrinsic motivation as reflected, for example, by behavior that persists with a minimum of external support. We refer to these initiating or regulatory events as informational. Events that are experienced as pressure toward particular outcomes-thus co-opting choice and facilitating an external perceived locus of causality-tend to undermine intrinsic mo- tivation, restrict creativity (Amabile, 1983), and impair cognitive flexibility (McGraw & McCullers, 1979). We refer to these events as controlling. Finally, events which are experienced as conveying that the person cannot master an activity-thus promoting perceived incompetence-undermine intrinsic motivation and tend to leave one feeling helpless (e.g., Boggiano & Barrett, 1984). We refer to these events as amotivating.

The General Causality Orientations Scale: Self-Determination in Personality

The significance of autonomy versus control for the maintenance of intrin-sic motivation has been clearly observed in studies of classroom learning.For example, several studies have shown that autonomy-supportive (in con-trast to controlling) teachers catalyze in their students greater intrinsic moti-vation, curiosity, and the desire for challenge (e.g., Deci, Nezlek, & Shein-man, 1981; Ryan & Grolnick, 1986). Students who are overly controlled notonly lose initiative but also learn less well, especially when learning is com-plex or requires conceptual, creative processing (Benware & Deci, 1984;Grolnick & Ryan, 1987). Similarly, studies show children of parents whoare more autonomy supportive to be more mastery oriented—more likely tospontaneously explore and extend themselves—than children of parents whoare more controlling (Grolnick, Deci, & Ryan, 1997)

In fact, the majority of the research on the effects of environmental eventson intrinsic motivation has focused on the issue of autonomy versus controlrather than that of competence. And this issue has been considerably morecontroversial. The research began with the demonstration that extrinsic re-wards can undermine intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1971; Lepper, Greene, &Nisbett, 1973), which we interpret in terms of the reward shifting peoplefrom a more internal to external perceived locus of causality. Although theissue of rewards has been hotly debated, a recent meta-analysis (Deci, Koes-tner, & Ryan, in press) confirms that virtually every type of expected tangiblereward made contingent on task performance does, in fact, undermine intrin-sic motivation. Furthermore, not only tangible rewards, but also threats(Deci & Cascio, 1972), deadlines (Amabile, DeJong, & Lepper, 1976), direc-tives (Koestner, Ryan, Bernieri, & Holt, 1984), and competition pressure(Reeve & Deci, 1996) diminish intrinsic motivation because, according toCET, people experience them as controllers of their behavior. On the otherhand, choice and the opportunity for self-direction (e.g., Zuckerman, Porac,Lathin, Smith, & Deci, 1978) appear to enhance intrinsic motivation, as theyafford a greater sense of autonomy

ntrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions andNew Directions

o often, the feedbackgiven is unrelated to achieving success on critical dimensions of the goal. Forexample, students are given feedback on presentation, spelling, and quantity inwriting when the criteria for success require, say, “creating mood in a story.” Su

ffective feedback must answer three major questions asked by ateacher and/or by a student: Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am Igoing? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and Where to next? (Whatactivities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) Th

he main purpose of feedback is to reduce discrepancies between cur-rent understandings and performance and a goal. S

Difficult goals370.51Easy, do your best goal

addition, when the feed-back was administered in a controlling manner (e.g., saying that students per-formed as they “should” have performed), the effects were even worse (–0.78).Thus, Deci et al. concluded that extrinsic rewards are typically negative becausethey “undermine people’s taking responsibility for motivating or regulating them-selves” (p. 659). Rather, they are a controlling strategy that often leads to greatersurveillance, evaluation, and competition, all of which have been found to under-mine enhanced engagement and regulation (Deci & Ryan, 1985)

ngiblerewards significantly undermined intrinsic motivation, particularly for interestingtasks (–0.68) compared with uninteresting tasks (0.18). I

Rewards and punishments89 0.14Wilkinson (1981)Teacher praise14 0.12

It is most powerful when it addresses faulty interpretations, not a totallack of understanding.

eedback is information with which a learner can confirm, add to,overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information isdomain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cog-nitive tactics and strategies”

The Power of Feedback

78.9% of the pupils who actually received grades would have preferred written comments, and 86.3% of those who received comments were satisfied with this mode of evaluation

Nor- mative grades provide information about proficiency relative to others; they do not provide clear standards for self-evalua- tion or for constructive attribution (Nisan, 1981). Our finding that 50% of the pupils who received no feedback would rather have received a grade may seem compatible with the argu- ments of many teachers that pupils themselves want grades

in the grades group, 26.7% attributed effort to the desire to avoid poor scores, and 34.4% attributed it to the importance of success, whereas among those who received no feedback only 7.2% attributed effort to the desire to avoid poor scores and 40% attributed it to the "positive" aspect of need achievement, the desire to succeed.

subjects who received written comments expressed greater interest in the tasks than did those in the other two groups, especially for the question requiring greatest commitment -- the number of extra tasks chosen

Our results suggest, as some critics argue (Holt, 1964; Sil- berman, 1970), that the information routinely given in schools -- that is, grades -- may encourage an emphasis on quanti- tative aspects of learning, depress creativity, foster fear of failure, and undermine interest. They also suggest that no such negative results ensue from the use of task-related individual- ized comments.

Even though the findings of much previous research, which compared motivation after a single trial under extrinsic and no-incentive conditions, implied that if "left alone," in- trinsic motivation for an initially interesting task would remain stable and high, our conception suggested that, in fact, re- peated nonreceipt of feedback would undermine interest. We also predicted that numerical grades would foster extrinsic mo- tivation at the expense of intrinsic motivation. The results showed clearly differential effects of these kinds of feedback on per- formance.

Harter's (1978) finding that expectation of letter grades affected children's task motivation in ways similar to the various extrinsic rewards used in other stud- ies