Who dunnit? Metatags and hyperauthorship

Multiple authorship is a topic of growing concern in a number of scientific domains. When, as is increasingly common, scholarly articles and clinical reports have scores or even hundreds of authors - what Cronin (in press) has termed hyperauthorship - the precise nature of each individual's contribution is often masked. A notation that describes collaborators' contributions and allows those contributions to be tracked in, and across, texts (and over time) offers a solution. Such a notation should be useful, easy to use, and acceptable to communities of scientists. Drawing on earlier work, we present a proposal for an XML-like contribution mark-up, and discuss the potential benefits and possible drawbacks

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