“In those days none of the good ecologists put their names on their students’ papers. I don’t think [Robert] Paine ever put his name on a student’s paper, nor do I remember Joe Connell doing so, nor [Gunnar] Thorson nor [Roger] Kitching or any good ecologists of the era. I did not do so either. Joint authorships were done when you genuinely worked together on a project, and I put Paine on some of my early Antarctic papers as he contributed a lot. So the real question is why it is so common now, and the obvious answer is that our “fame” seems to depend on number of papers and citations rather than the creative breakthroughs or important advances to a field. I like to think that the colleagues I care about are able to evaluate my “worth” based on, both, publications and independent students not dragging my name around as a “Matthew Effect"! The problem is that our bureaucrats are too lazy to do their jobs well, and want to be dazzled by metrics such as numbers of papers irrespective of whether the papers say anything worth while or those stupid H values that reflect nothing of much importance that I can see. And nobody any more keeps track of successful students we mentor, and here is where I want to stake my legacy.”

“In those days, I did not have access of the wonderful graphics programs available today. So, the graphics are crude by today’s standards. However, I prepared all figures with assistance from a Departmental graphics person (those positions likely do not exist anymore or are rare).”

“In those days, in IISc [Indian Institute of Science], if you wanted new journals, there was this little magazine, Current Contents, which came out with an abstract of journal content in different areas every week. You’d get it on Wednesdays into the IISc library. I would go there and write down the addresses of authors whose papers I was interested in, and come back to CES. Madhav [Gadgil] had a stock of postcards. We would fill out postcards with little reprint requests for authors, and mail it off into the deep blue sea. Three months, sometimes six months, sometimes a year and a half later, you’d get a response. I’d say about 40% of the people would be kind enough to send us reprints; 60% just disappeared. I mean, I don’t know where they went.”

“In those days, it was a bit hard to know, because we didn’t have “impact factors” or twitter or other kinds of social media. In fact, we barely had email! So, I don’t really know that much about how it was received, except that I have been surprised over the years by how often it is cited”

“In those days, search engines were not very good. So finding it [the paper] was not a trivial thing for somebody. And if you didn’t know it existed, you wouldn’t have found it.”

“It [PhD supervisor not being an author] was more common then than it is now, but I think it also varies between disciplines and between advisors, and also between countries. I do remember asking Monty Slatkin if he would be coauthor. He gave me a tremendous amount of help, obviously, on my first theoretical paper. But he said, no, this was your idea, and you did most of the work, and you should take the credit. He has had a very enlightened, very generous attitude for his entire career with all of his students. I know that in some fields, and in some countries, it’s actually a sign of disrespect of the advisor if he or she does not want to be associated with the paper. It’s considered an insult to the student – the advisor is effectively saying that I’m washing my hands of this work. That was certainly not my case. Monty’s attitude was, if you come up with the idea and you do most of the work, then it’s yours.”

“It was a daunting task to work with so many fishes as things stood. More recently, my lab employs stable isotope methods to study food web ecology, which is much faster and easier than dissecting thousands of fish specimens and examining fragments of food items under a microscope.”

“it was a different era back then, especially at Princeton. At that time, it was not customary to put the dissertation advisor on the thesis unless the dissertation advisor had been quite extensively involved in the design and execution of the project. John [Terborgh] strongly encouraged his graduate students to design and implement their own research plans. That was the reason. It certainly reflected no disagreement between John and me or anything like that. Today, professors tend to be coauthors of the work done by their graduate students.”

“It was a practical issue. Remember, at that time we were going and photocopying papers out of journals. And the idea in meta-analysis at that time was more to come up with a defined, unbiased list of papers that you would want to include and then search those out. We also only looked at a certain number of journals; major ecological journals. You wouldn’t do a meta-analysis that way now because there’s electronic access, and not only access to the journal articles, but to the databases for searching for articles. Those databases didn’t really exist, you know. Web of Science didn’t exist. Science Citation Index was just, it was in paper and it was very awkward to use; you couldn’t search for keywords. So it was strictly a practical issue and it was still at the very edge of our capacity to accumulate all of that information.”

“It was considerably before molecular biology and the experimental methods at the time seem remarkably antique. It might be described as the kitchen phase of experimental biology!”

“It was not easy at that time to see the reaction [to the paper]. Now, you can see it quite quickly by the number of downloads and the social media reaction.”

“It was really very, very large and challenging to do that analysis. And of course, in those days, nothing was electronic. We were photocopying all the articles from, you know, from the print versions of the journals that we got at the university library and, you know, doing things in a way that you wouldn’t do them now. And the statistics also is much more simplistic than what we would do nowadays.”

“it was such a big data set, and also, the statistics of it very tricky. It was a split plot design, which nobody knew how to analyze in those days; at least none of my acquaintances knew. This was of course before the internet, so I couldn’t just go on and, you know, find somebody with an R script that knew how to do it. So that stuck me back a bit. I had lots of conversations with people about how to analyze the data. A few told me, oh no, you can’t do it. I said, well, you know, of course we can do it; we just have to figure out a way.”

“It’s funny because, I think, only in the last maybe 15 years, maybe less than that, has this [criteria to decide authorship order] changed. So it used to be that in Molecular Biology, the last author was the person whose lab it was in, and so their name went on everything. But in Ecology and Evolution, no! In Ecology and Evolution, the first author was the person who was really responsible for the work. And then after that, it was the second author who had done the second most contributions, the third the third most and so on and so forth. And it’s only very recently – well, I’m not sure whether you think 10 years is recent or not – it’s only within about the last 10 years or so that that’s changed. Now last author is viewed as an influential authorship in Ecology and Evolution, as well as in Molecular Biology.”

“Jean Gladstone [was] my laboratory assistant, charged with handling the project data files and running the analysis programs at the campus computer center (no desktop at the time).”

“Keep in mind that these were early days in primatology. I doubt that my casual observational methods would be acceptable today.”

“Let me say one other thing. Yeah. In today’s attribution ethics, probably three quarters of the people in those acknowledgements would have been co-authors, if the paper were written today, because we tend to include more co-authors now, than we did then. In those days, the authors were the people who were the leaders, and if they had a technician or two, or a colleague who they had lunch with and talked about their work, they didn’t include them as co-authors; they were acknowledged.”

“Lynda Delph did all the figures for that paper. Besides being trained as a scientist, she had been trained in graphic design and illustration. She did the figures by hand with a simple Leroy set, and they are beautiful to my eye. I have the originals on the wall in my office.”

“Making figures was a pain! I tried two techniques – sticking black letters and lines to the paper, and using a stencil to draw/print with ink. Decidedly hand-made.”

“Mick Crawley taught me stats. He taught me a program called GLIM, which was used widely by ecologists before R became popular – and his book on GLIM for ecologists was the precursor of his popular text on R.”