Authorship, attribution and acknowledgment in archaeology

Abstract

In 2021 the COVIDSurg Collaborative broke the world record for most co-authors on a peerreviewed article in the journal Anaesthesia 15,025, who are listed in a 77-page supplement. The previous record, with 5,000 authors, was published in Nature in 2015. Despite growing concerns about the devaluing of authorship, the COVIDSurg study is entirely appropriate for a study involving over 140,000 people in 116 countries. The work could not have happened without collaboration across fields of expertise and national borders. This resonates with archaeologists, who typically work in groups with diverse partners. But we sometimes struggle with deciding who – or what – makes the cut as an ‘author’ as opposed to someone mentioned in the acknowledgments or left out altogether. Added to this is our social science sensibility of how knowledge production works in a twenty-first-century post-colonial context.