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.

科学中的优先规则被解释为科学界的行为调节器，它通过充分构建现有研究计划中的智力劳动分配来造福社会。此外，它被称赞为奖励科学家贡献的一种直观公平的方式，作为社会“大奖励计划”的一个特例。然而，我们将争辩说，当前用于建模优先规则的正式框架理想化了信用归因的重要方面，并且这样做的方式会影响关于其在科学界的功能所得出的结论。特别是，我们考虑了信用归因的社会动态，以表明优先规则可以在社会多样化科学中助长结构性劣势，