After spending some time on math.stackexchange, my impression is that a substantial part of the questions is asked by active professional researchers (PhD, postdoc, prof., etc). Let's suppose such a person is stuck in his/her research, asks a question on stackexchange, gets "unstuck" because of a good answer, and writes a paper about it. Shouldn't the person providing the helpful answer (however small the contribution in the overall paper) be offered co-authorship? More generally, is it ethical to crowd-source research on stackexchange without stating one's professional interest in the answer?
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5(Browsing recent questions on math.SE regularly, I think it is inaccurate to say professional researchers make up a substantial part of the question askers there. On MO, maybe.) – Jakob Streipel Aug 31 '22 at 13:00
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There's also a fairly large gap between "a helpful answer that smoothed things over" and "something that was sufficiently important to merit co-authorship". Hell, I have a friend who used a proposition I suggested in conversation once and I was happy enough when they credited me in the paper inline. – Aug 31 '22 at 13:26
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2Also related (but closed): Do I have to make someone coauthor if he/she solves a problem in StackExchange, asked by myself, which is later used in my paper? – Anyon Aug 31 '22 at 13:27
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is it ethical to crowd-source research on stackexchange without stating one's professional interest in the answer? Can someone translate this question into the plain English? I understand every word and the grammatical structure, but the meaning totally eludes me :-) – fedja Aug 31 '22 at 23:32