The pattern followed in biology and medicine is that the first (“lead”) author is the person who did the bulk of the work, the last (“anchor”) author is the person who “owns” the lab or is the senior author and the rest (the “sandwich” authors) either did some work (e.g. lab techs, assistants, undergraduates, graduate students working on a secondary project, etc.) provided some special service or expertise (e.g. statistical analysis, specialised analytical testing, special techniques, etc.) or needed to be acknowledged by more than mentioning their name under “acknowledgements”.

Some labs have are very “stingy” about who they add as authors, others will list as authors anyone who touched the project in any way. Generally, if any or all of the “sandwich” authors contributed as much as the lead author (or anchor author), there will be mention of that somewhere in the paper, usually right below the author list.

It also needs to be emphasised that Dr. Thorsen’s “offense” may (and probably is) no more than not giving Aarhus University their “cut” of his grant money. Universities traditionally get a portion of all grant money that comes to researchers from outside the university, either as a separate payment from the granting agency or as a “tithe” (usually more like 50%) from the grant. This is called “overhead”.

I suspect that the $2 million is money that Aarhus University thinks they should have gotten as “overhead” while Dr. Thorsen was working elsewhere. The other likely possibility is that Aarhus University feels grants Dr. Thorsen received while on their faculty should have been spent in their facilities, rather than paying for salaries and supplies somewhere else.

At any rate, the least likely possibility is that Dr. Thorsen actually embezzled any money, since he had no direct access to the money. Grants don’t arrive as boxes of cash – they are paid to the university or research center which then has their financial department disburse the funds as purchase orders (which are scrutinised by the financial department to ensure that they conform to the terms of the grant) or as salaries (which are scrutinised by both the financial and personnel departments).

This is a tempest in a teapot raised by those people who had “hitched their wagons” to Andy Wakefield’s star and are distressed by how far and fast that star has fallen. They hope to regain some “sparkle” by tarnishing the research that has refuted their claims.

Unfortunately, even if all the research touched by Dr. Thorsen were to magically disappear, there would still be more than enough to refute the claim that vaccines – with or without thimerosal – cause autism.

Prometheus

Sullivan, yes, I recall that. That’s what I was saying.

My experience as a graduate student, postdoc, and PI has been that there are many papers with names of authors who never had anything at all to do with the work—they’re on there because they’re senior researchers with the grant money or they’re buds with the PI, or in the same department or lab, etc. They might read the paper, but that’s it. Some of the better journals are trying to limit this sort of thing by having submissions detail the contributions of each listed author (e.g., “So-and-so wrote the paper, performed some data analysis, and reviewed the results; Such-and-such performed the experiments, coordinated the animal care and surgeries, and analyzed the data; and Whosits designed the study and reviewed the paper.” Journals are doing this not to have authors come across as a “team” but to keep people from padding their publication lists while having done exactly nothing. Not sure how well it’s working.

Most scientists can’t write for toffees

Did you get that straight?

Most scientists are not writers, they need editing, I would even go to the point of saying for some they need ghost writing.

Then there is the whole convention which has arisen, originally I think to deflect glory hunting epistolaureates of multiple authorship on papers, the whole notion of creating an ambience of team membership and effort. (how neurotypical of them) Anyway if you have had the least effort in dotting a few i’s you might get the social reward of being allowed in the citation, it’s a bit like being mentioned in despatches, an ‘almost’ medal.

Remember how Dr. Wakefield was on a recent monkey paper because he “designed” the study? Both he and Laura Hewitson made a big point out of having not had anything to do with the data. One can be an author, can be a contributor, without having access to the raw data.

From the sound of the senior authors’ responses to the queries, he was on these papers almost as a “courtesy” author, probably because of his position in the institute/connections, rather than as someone who did any actual analysis or data gathering. Of course, now everyone’s supposed to swear that any listed author on a paper contributed substantially to the work at hand, so if he didn’t, that’s nefarious, as well…but as we know, everyone does that sort of logrolling. That’s another issue entirely.

Add to that Sullivan’s point that these two studies are two of more than 20 have yielded results in agreement: no link.

It should be noted that the folks at Age of Autism have long disparaged these studies; this just gives them a fresh angle.

I also sent out numerous emails since this broke at the end of last week, all unreturned until today. Today, I emailed the American Psychiatric Association with a link to the Philadelphia Inquirer story and to my post calling for the APA to remove Thorsen from the DSM5 workgroup while this matter was ongoing. My reply back was that I should offer my comments on the DSM5 site instead. I emailed back asking if it would make a difference if I reworded my email into the form of a question, would they be removing him? No answer.

Whatever the truth is, we should and will be willing to acknowledge. In that, we stand apart from those who have already made up their minds that they know what they know.