First/last author incentives are the biggest blocker to interdisciplinary team science
RexDouglass · x · 2026-11-09
In a discussion of NIH's new team-science funding mechanism, researchers argue the core obstacle is authorship incentives: grad students need first-author papers for careers while professors need last-author ones, forcing projects to be sliced into artificial sub-papers for each discipline — workable but slow. Funders mostly respond by asking people to act against self-interest rather than creating new positive incentives. PracheeAC adds that traditional journal publishing and fractional time commitments also clash with winner-take-all authorship haggling, and that focusing on utility and responsibility makes science faster and smoother.
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