I, We, and They: A Linguistic and Narrative Exploration of the Authorship Process

Introduction: While authorship plays a powerful role in the academy, research indicates many authors engage in questionable practices like honorary authorship. This suggests that authorship may be a contested space where individuals must exercise agency--a dynamic and emergent process, embedded in context--to negotiate potentially conflicting norms among published criteria, disciplines, and informal practices. This study explores how authors narrate their own and others' agency in making authorship decisions. Method: We conducted a mixed-methods analysis of 24 first authors' accounts of authorship decisions on a recent multi-author paper. Authors included 14 females and 10 males in health professions education (HPE) from U.S. and Canadian institutions (10 assistant, 6 associate, and 8 full professors). Analysis took place in three phases: (1) linguistic analysis of grammatical structures shown to be associated with agency (coding for main clause subjects and verb types); (2) narrative analysis to create a "moral" and "title" for each account; and (3) integration of (1) and (2). Results: Participants narrated other authors most frequently as main clause subjects (n = 191), then themselves (I; n = 151), inanimate nouns (it, the paper; n = 146), and author team (we; n = 105). Three broad types of agency were narrated: distributed (n = 15 participants), focusing on how resources and work were spread across team members; individual (n = 6), focusing on the first author's action; and collaborative (n = 3), focusing on group actions. These three types of agency contained four sub-types, e.g., supported, contested, task-based, negotiated. Discussion: This study highlights the complex and emergent nature of agency narrated by authors when making authorship decisions. Published criteria offer us starting point--the stated rules of the authorship game; this paper offers us a next step--the enacted and narrated approach to the game.

Efficiently answering reachability and path queries on temporal bipartite graphs

Bipartite graphs are naturally used to model relationships between two different types of entities, such as people-location, author-paper, and customer-product. When modeling real-world applications like disease outbreaks, edges are often enriched with temporal information, leading to temporal bipartite graphs. While reachability has been extensively studied on (temporal) unipartite graphs, it remains largely unexplored on temporal bipartite graphs. To fill this research gap, in this paper, we study the reachability problem on temporal bipartite graphs. Specifically, a vertex u reaches a vertex w in a temporal bipartite graph G if u and w axe connected through a series of consecutive wedges with time constraints. Towards efficiently answering if a vertex can reach the other vertex, we propose an index-based method by adapting the idea of 2-hop labeling. Effective optimization strategies and parallelization techniques are devised to accelerate the index construction process. To better support real-life scenarios, we further show how the index is leveraged to efficiently answer other types of queries, e.g., single-source reachability query and earliest-arrival path query. Extensive experiments on 16 real-world graphs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed techniques.

Abstract 15074: Impact of Conducting Basic Science versus Clinical Research During Training on Future Academic Productivity Among Cardiothoracic Surgeons

Introduction: There is growing concern regarding the attrition of surgeon-scientists in cardiothoracic (CT) surgery. The academic impact of conducting basic science research (BSR) during training, however, remains unknown. We hypothesized that CT surgeons who publish a first-author BSR paper during training exhibit enhanced future academic productivity. Methods: CT surgeons on faculty at accredited United States CT surgery training hospitals in 2018 who published a first-author BSR paper or a first-author clinical research (CR) paper during training were identified (n=762). To normalize for environmental differences in research exposure, we specifically studied the surgeons who pursued a research fellowship and who attended a top-50 NIH-funded institution at every stage of training (n=252). Data regarding each surgeon’s professional history and publication record were obtained from publicly-available online sources. Results: As shown in Table 1, surgeons who published a first-author paper in BSR during training and those who published a first-author paper only in CR share similar characteristics and have practiced as an attending surgeon for a similar duration (11.0 years each, p=0.486). However, surgeons who published a first-author BSR paper during training ultimately published more papers per year as an attending (4.3 vs 2.8, p=0.017), resulting in more total publications (73.5 vs 47.5, p=0.003) and a greater H-index (22.0 vs 18.0, p=0.004). The surgeons who published a first-author BSR paper during training were also more likely to have published a BSR paper in the past 2 years as an attending, both as a first or last author (12.0% vs 2.0%, p=0.004), or as a co-author (34.0% vs 15.7%, p=0.001). Conclusions: Academic CT surgeons who published a first-author BSR paper during training exhibit enhanced research productivity and scholarly impact. Funding and institutional support for aspiring CT surgeon-scientists may yield career-long academic benefits.

Scientometric Analysis of Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers (2008-2017)

This study aims to present a scientometric analysis of the journal titled vikalpa: the journal for decision makers” for the period from 2008 to 2017. The present study was conducted with an aim to provide a summary of research activity in the current journal and characterize its most important aspects. The analysis covers mainly the year wise distribution of articles, category wise classification of papers, authorship patterns of papers, the degree of collaboration, most prolific contributions of papers, institution-wise distribution of contributions and geographical distribution of papers of the journal. The analysis showed that 325 papers were published in the journal of vikalpa: the journal for decision makers” for the period from 2008 to 2017. The maximum number of publication was recorded in 2014 (39 articles, 12.00%) while the minimum was in the year 2017 (21 articles, 6.46%). The authorship pattern was studied to determine the percentage of single and multiple authorship. It is observed from the study that a single author 114(35.08%) paper occupied the 2nd rank. Two author paper 132(40.62%) occupied in 1st rank. Three author paper 41 (12.62 %) occupied in 3rd rank and more than three author paper 38(11.69%) occupied in 4th rank. The study exposes that during 2008-17 the highest proportion of papers were by single authors 114 followed by papers with two authors 211, and more than three authors 325. Among the ten years of the study period, the highest degree of collaboration occurred in the year of 2012. The growth rate is 0.72 in 2008 and which decreased up to 0.07 in 2017. The mean relative growth rate for the periods of 2008 to 2017 the relative growth rate of 0.223. This study period resulted that the mean doubling time for total output 4.088 years. It is observed from the study that the highest number of contributors is belonging to India with 270 articles out of 325 total articles published and its percentage is 83.08 %.