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.