Andre at BioCurious has checked out the authorship of the Tiktaalik papers and concluded that the grad students got jobbed, PhD comics style:
Another thing I noticed is that only the supervisors are listed as authors on the two papers they published. I know there were many grad students also involved in the project because Daeschler showed a picture of someone fighting off a dust storm trying to get gear from a landing helicopter and he joked that that's what they're for. At least, I thought he was joking... Maybe it's a palaeontology thing, but if this was say, a particle physics paper, all the significant contributors would be there.
There were a bunch of acknowledgments, but if you prepare the specimens or discover the fossil shouldn't you get authorship? Genome papers are like the particle physics papers of biology. If you so much as stare at a sequencing machine that generates at least a single nucleotide that is used in the genome assembly, you may show up as an author on a genome paper. I am, of course, exaggerating. You need to touch the machine.
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I posted something similar at BioCurious, but its a clarification worth making twice.
Paleontology is not molecular biology. These senior guys did the work - they spent weeks out there, digging up fossils, etc.
I know the folks involved in this work- they don't steal from their students. Steve Gatsey who is thanked is NOT a grad student, but a long standing colleague, a senior professor at Brown, and a damn good friend of the authors.
Culture differs across discipline. I know very few molecular biology grad students who can publish their own papers without all the folks in the lab. On the other hand in field biology, paleontology, ecology and the like it happens all the time. The students of these faculty (who I know) have their own projects, doing independent work, finding their own fossils, and have an independence that usually doesn't accrue to folks in lab based scientists till post-doc level or beyond.
Thanks for the clarification. I think it's pretty uniformially agreed across disciplines that if you contribute to the intellectual content of a paper you deserve authorship. At least that's how it's supposed to work. How you define an intellectual contribution is probably quite flexible and who contributes differs depending on the field.
To reinforce paleogirl's remark above, here is a recent paleo Letter in Nature sole-authored by a graduate student. Here is one, also in Nature, by a relatively junior grad student (first author) and a senior faculty member, his supervisor.