The (increasing?) practice of expanding co-author list after paper acceptance...

Something funny happened on Easychair the day after acceptance decisions were sent.

We noticed that a lot of people have logged in and added additional co-authors to their--now accepted--papers. In many cases 2, 3 and even 4 authors were being added!

Since we had kept backup snapshots of Easychair every week during the review period, we knew the original author lists for all the papers (which is how they are being listed on the accepted paper list ).

I understand that sometimes we may get non-trivial help from a colleague after paper submission that qualitatively changes the camera-ready version, thus legitimately necessitating author list expansion. We have done this ourselves a couple of times in our group.

Still,  it is a bit surprising that  50+  papers suddenly found this need. Even more surprising that many of them  found that they had additional help from not just one but "multiple" forgotten co-authors. Clearly the adage--that success has many parents, while failure is an orphan--seems to be playing out in spades here ;-)

So we decided to look into this phenomenon more closely by requesting authors to provide a justification as to why the new co-authors need to be added.  We are now getting mails from even more people, with requests to add 1, 2 or 3 co-authors.

The justifications range from the quite reasonable ones, such as

"I forgot to give credit to an undergraduate intern who helped with the work"

"X helped me prove an additional theorem" 

to the  somewhat questionable

"X helped with the rebuttal"

"X financially supported this work"

"X, Y and Z just got permission from their companies to join as authors"

"X wants to come to the conference, and thus would like their name on the paper" 

"because X is a respected researcher in our university"

to the utterly  inexplicable

"I have forgotten about listing any of my co-authors".

"We didn't put some of the authors when submitting for blind review"

"When trying to beat the submission deadline, we wanted to save time by listing just one author"

It seems to me that the situation has come a long way from adding authors when legitimately needed to deliberately keeping original author lists incomplete.

There may also be some implicit cultural norms at work here, in as much as over 90% of the papers expanding author list after acceptance are from a specific region.

Large scale author list modification post-acceptance does pose several quandaries for the conference. In addition to the obvious intangible long-term ones such as  cheapening co-authorship, there is the more immediate and tangible  one: We rely on author lists to ensure that conflicts of interest situations are avoided. It becomes very hard to do that if the author lists are fluid and subject to massive changes after acceptance.

In other areas, such as Signal Processing and Computer Architecture,  changes to  the author list post-acceptance is not allowed. Period.  (Granted, some of these conferences also have limitations on the number of submissions any single individual can be a part of, and fluid author lists defeat the limitation by allowing a backdoor for hyper-prolificity ).

Even if we don't want to be quite so strict, it does make sense to discourage the practice of keeping initial author list  deliberately incomplete. Perhaps AI conferences should emphasize the obvious at submission time: that author lists are expected to be complete  at the time of submission.

Rao