In the heat of the moment, one tends to want to err on the side of the generous. One wants to say thanks for every favor. One wants to extend the largesse that comes from a work making it into the light of (publishing) day. Then, after a more sober moment, one has to consider the effects of such acknowledgments in the long run. After all, if one sets precedence for giving out public kudos for every small thing, then one can start encouraging presumption in a negative way.

Making the Actual Decision based on Metrics

I tend to forget how much work has gone into a project unless I am looking at the hours logged or am remembering a particularly tough work stint. One helpful metric is to weight the amount of work put into something with what someone else has directly contributed. The benefit of the occasional kudos is low. Soliciting an opinion is all fine and good, but that doesn’t often mean a larger benefit to the actual original work.

Going on metrics means actually looking at what others contributed and whether they were important to a project or not.

If one puts something inaccurate into print, it will have a way of coming back to haunt the author. For one, supervisors who are thanked for just putting in an occasional encouragement will start to presume that they should be thanked for everything. A colleague who wants credit just for being a colleague will expect to be mentioned. PIs often expect credit simply for being PIs, and in some domain fields, that’s the expectation.

Taking up Mental Space

People seem to want credit even if they have not contributed to a project but if they’ve even thought about it. I hear snippets of people claiming to have worked on a project when all they did was attend a few meetings and sharing an idea or two. Nothing hands-on.

Then, too, I’ve been on the other side..where I conducted research and wrote up a pedagogical piece for a grant that was funded at $600K and didn’t get notified when the department got funded and didn’t even get a thank you. (At that time, my office billed for my hours only after a certain threshold of hours, and so my office was not even paid for the work.)

Standards

The standards that I’m learning to use are the same ones that I use for writing letters of recommendation. If I am called on what I wrote, can I support what I said with facts and still live with my decision in the long run? If the answer is no, then it’s wiser for me to back-off any assertions and go with the privileges of silence.

Others are more generous about giving credit such as kudos by group email, but my sense of that is that it’s more about a person showing that he or she is nice. That niceness works on the local scale, but false niceness becomes a constraint on my own degrees of freedom and work space into the future. Acknowledgments shouldn’t be merely unthinking and reflexive. They should be for earned mentions.

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