Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I've found that CS contributions in academia are often poorly credited (sometimes even entirely neglected) to endeavors not purely executed within CS itself.

It's interesting considering how many modern scientific endeavors are dependent on new innovative algorithms, software, and computing techniques in both experimental and theoretical work then its frequently just hand-waved away as "technology."

I'm not saying such contributions (typically, though they can,) lay groundwork for an experiment or theory in another domain, but I am saying active CS involvement/expertise is typically critical to many scientific endeavors' success these days. If a project is interdiscipinary, there's probably a computer scientist on the team helping out.



I’ve gotten authorship when I have collaborated on the paper itself (rather than just research: that’s how you get into acknowledgements, same as lab techs, collaborators who didn’t work on this specific paper, etc.)


Although I agree with the point you have raised, it can sometimes be a little tricky to draw the line. Should we have Microsoft cited for projects completed using their software or system? Should we always cite Newton when using calculus?

I think society implicitly assumes that there has been a tone of people backing up a single individual towards their main achievements and that the individual is humble enough to know and to try - ever so slightly - to show appreciation.


That's why I said "actively."

From my perspective, if in order to accomplish your work, you need consult or active collaboration with a computer scientist and otherwise could not develop/test your theory or conduct your experiment, then they almost certainly should be cited as an author/collaborator.

If you utilize something OTS outside the project that just works for you and don't need a computer scientist, then whatever entity created that OTS IP isn't really an author/collaborator, but it's likely their work should be cited/referenced if it's part of the critical methodology (as part of disclosure and repeatability).

If your project used Microsoft Word to write up a report, it's not important to the underlying science you conducted. You could have substituted it with TeX, other Word processors, or pen/paper and it wouldn't change the outcome of the underlying theory/experiment you developed. If you used an Ansys package to perform analysis for some purpose, you should probably mention that out of rigor but Ansys isn't an author or collaborator.

If on the other hand you need someone to architect a solution to handle processing your massive dataset, needed someone to write custom code because nothing could do what you needed, needed a new algorithm because you had no clue how to approach the problem, or even needed someone to modify source code significantly to something that existed but couldn't do what you needed, then they are certainly an author/collaborator. If you took existing code/algorithm and made it more efficient in order to accomplish a task that would have taken too long otherwise, you're a contributor/collaborator and should be listed as an author.

This has been a huge issue in academic research but it's been getting a bit better and researchers are starting even more to acknowledge/credit computing professionals as crucial contributors and authors, as they rightfully should be.


> That's why I said "actively."

That's one of the reasons I said "I agree with the point you have raised".

I also think you have once again, raised some good points. Hopefully, others will use similar structures when writing and publishing their research.


In this case she is a Computer Scientist, so the CS contributions are the first author on the paper.


Not just CS, but depending on the discipline, math and statistics more generally.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: