¹ For an interesting examination of connected issues see Biagioli, Marion and Galison, Peter (eds.) Scientific Authorship (London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar. The deliberations of this volume though relevant to our present concerns, are differently oriented. For one thing they deal with authorship rather than credit. And for another they address factual issues regarding how authorship works and not normative issues of how credit should be allocated or partitioned.

² On these issues see Stigler, Stephen M., Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

³ On this whole episode see the article by L. K. Altman M.D. in The New York Times, Tuesday, March 7, 2000, pages D7 and D10.

⁴ The history of inquiry—in science and elsewhere—is, of course, a mixture of progress and error, of finding and mis-finding, of getting information and mis-information. And we have no alternative here to seeing “discovery” as a matter of discovery facts, taking this to mean the facts as we see them from the standpoint of the present state of the field.

⁵ Clause (3) leads to complications here. For a mis-finding may well pave the way to an important finding, as, for example, Priestly's phlogiston led to Lavoisier's oxygen. That erroneous “discovery” may very well pave the way to an important discovery. It too is thus important—albeit only of historical rather than substantive importance. Thus if “merely historical” importance is to be excluded, then clause (3) would have to be qualified with respect to the truth-claims of the “finding” at issue.

⁶ An informative treatment of cooperation in general, without, however, any specific reference to inquiry or research, in Tuomela, Raimo, Cooperation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ “The central characteristic of a tenancy in common is simply that such tenant is deemed to own by himself, with most of the attributes of independent ownership, a physically individual part of the entire parcel.” (Bergin, Thomas F. and Haskell, Paul G., Preface to Estates in Land and Future Interests, 2nd ed., University Textbook Series (Foundation Press, 1991), p. 54Google Scholar

⁸ With papers publishing research produced under conditions of multilateral distributive cooperation it makes sense to list the names of the contributors in order of decreasing shares. With those produced under conditions of multilateral collective cooperation an alphabetical or anti-alphabetical order should ideally be used standardly and systematically to synchronize the character of the inquiry.

⁹ Of course even within the setting of teamwork there are often subordinate inquires that can be factored out into subordinate components for distributive pursuit. And some team members will generally deserve special credit on this basis. Thus one can often say that certain core contributions were due to one particular team member, which others then developed and refined in interactive fashion.

¹⁰ What we have here is not an act-pragmatism (“Take that course of action which is optimally efficient and effective…”) because in the contingency of affairs individual outcomes are inherently less predictable than statistical tendencies. Observe that the situation is structurally much the same here as that in ethics in the case of act-utilitarianism vs. rule-utilitarianism.