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Paper short abstract:

Considered as mere “units” to be counted in scientometrics circles, authors’ names are simultaneously a powerful technology of accountability in science. I investigate how authorship in biomedicine has been reframed so as to restore forms of individual responsibility in collaborative projects.

Paper long abstract:

When it comes to sociotechnologies of accountability, a diversity of rating systems, league tables, rankings, metrics and performance indicators generally come to the fore. Interestingly, previous studies of audit cultures have regularly overlooked a mundane, yet powerful, technology of accountability in academia: authors' names on scientific papers. Merely considered as "units" to be counted in scientometrics circles, names have also raised iterative concerns since the 1950s in biomedicine. With the rise of team research, multiple authorship and misconduct cases, the attribution of credit and the ascription of responsibility have been challenged to such an extend that, to some researchers, journal editors, and research administrators, authorship does not properly account for who did what anymore.

Drawing on a series of various documents (editorials, letters to editors, conferences proceedings, disclosure forms of contributions…), I will examine the way the opening up of authorship has resulted in the experimentation of alternative procedures of attribution, the amendment of professional guidelines, and the implementation of innovative tools. In so doing, I will investigate the steps by which authorship in biomedicine has been progressively turned into a transparency device and an accountability technology. Two side-effects will also be emphasized: a growing body of works in ethics and the stabilization of a vocabulary to stigmatize malpractices. Such a moral crusade to restore individual accountability in collaborative projects eventually enacted a politics of transparency that distributes various forms of responsibility, and ascribes a peculiar status both to scientific authors and to journals.