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.