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Paper short abstract:

Medical science normatively defines an author as “someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study.” (ICMJE 2010) This conception carries important academic, social, financial, and legal aspects. The paper uses ethnographic data and the works of Mark Rose to interrogate this definition.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years various institutions and media in the UK and internationally have characterized scientific integrity as unsatisfactory. A major point of contention in the regulatory debates on scientific integrity relates to how scientists define themselves and others as authors in multi-author work. What makes a person an author? is often what we ask.

But more intriguingly: what makes an author a person?

Alongside the romantic view of the individual author identified by Foucault, an alternative socio-legal conception admits that "to be an author or inventor is to be a repository of a felicitous mix of inspiration, labor, money, cleverness, and luck" (Fisk 2010). Mark Rose has characterized as effectively mythical the view that "certain extraordinary beings called authors conjure works out of thin air" (1993, 142).

I use the debates on the regulation of science as my point of entry to interrogate the definition of authors and persons. To do this, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with the Committee on Publication Ethics, and on STS, anthropological and legal work on authorship in science. Instead of tracing how academic definitions of authorship provide a model for personhood, I try to do the reverse and show how a certain model of authorship informs our understandings of persons as well as their generative activities (Rose 1996, Biagioli and Galison 2002, Strathern 2002).