Priority and privilege in scientific discovery

The priority rule in science has been interpreted as a behavior regulator for the scientific community, which benefits society by adequately structuring the distribution of intellectual labor across pre-existing research programs. Further, it has been lauded as an intuitively fair way to reward scientists for their contributions, as a special case of society’s “grand reward scheme”. However, we will argue that the current formal framework utilized to model the priority rule idealizes away important aspects of credit attribution, and does so in a way that impacts the conclusions drawn regarding its function in scientific communities. In particular, we consider the social dynamics of credit attribution in order to show that the priority rule can foster structural disadvantages in socially diverse science, as well as drive the distribution of intellectual labor away from optimal.