As a scientist reading a substantial amount of papers I regularly read articles with inadequate referencing. Obviously some papers contain too many self-citations, however my main concern is about missed references. Why are the (co-)authors missing references to crucial and important work of others or, more worrisome on a personal level, to my own work? Here I would like to discuss this issue in more detail.

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Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a staff writer at Science magazine, has written an elegant article in the New York Times about the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel. The scientific misconduct of Stapel, including fabrication of data for at least 30 publications, outraged the scientific community a couple of years ago. At that time Stapel was the dean of the social and behavioral sciences faculty at the Tilburg university. He returned his [cum laude] Ph.D. title to the University of Amsterdam in November 2011, noting that his “behavior of the past years are inconsistent with the duties associated with the doctorate.”

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A problem I often encounter is deciding who to invite as co-authors. On one hand, you want to show appreciation to the people that helped you in the process of obtaining your results. On the other hand, generously adding authors will dilute the contribution of the people that made the largest contribution. In this post I would like to sketch a few hypothetical situations in which someone could be a co-author. The main goal here is to provoke some discussion on this subject, and learn about some good practices.

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