I am in a funny position of being a researchers whose value is not assessed on the number of papers I am author on. Therefore I am not particularly interested in Authorship, but it is useful to know the number of papers and acknowledgement as it becomes a measure for the department to say that it is contributing to research at the University. Eventually I suspect that I will have to keep detailed notes but at present it is just a matter of reporting.
There is however a distinct divide between the two areas. In medicine these days I get authorship on about half the papers. The reason for this is that I am a statistician and we have found over the years that having a statistician as author tends on the whole to reduce the number of analysis queries from reviewers. Then in medicine it is normal to have many authors on a paper. Also it is easy to track papers in medicine as they are all online!
Now come to the arts and social science. I rarely if ever am an author, but I am frequently cited in acknowledgements. This is fine. It is the culture of the discipline and the way it works. There is a slight problem in that usually I do not know if I am acknowledged unless I search for myself and then find it. However the proportion of published papers that are online in the Arts and Social Sciences is a lot less. It would be courtesy if they sent me an email when they acknowledged me in a paper!
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