Organickers do not give much credit to anyone who helps, but was not involved in the synthesis. Someone who purifies a product through schromatography or precipitation or whatever or someone else who does key characterization spectroscopically, might get an acknowledgement. When job-searching time comes, all those organickers are experts in crystallography, HPLC, NMR, whatever because they know what someone could do.

Oh, I see. So, if you had to estimate, how much of crystal data reported do you believe to be 100% true? If the crystallographer grows the crystal, fine go on the paper. Why should the crystallographer go on the paper if I grow the crystal and said crystallographer is not a grad student, but a paid faculty for the facility? Does the NMR tech go on every paper because they updated the bestshims file?

The difference between the NMR tech and the crystallographer is that the NMR tech doesn’t (necessarily) interpret your data. The crystallographer does interpret your data- a solved crystal structure is a best-fit model based on the diffraction of X-rays through your crystal, and this is nontrivial; the pretty picture you get is the culmination of a hell of a lot of work. Crystallography is, in fact, science, whether most organic chemists believe it or not.

The authors of a paper are ultimately responsible for the quality and interpretation of the data presented therein. If a paper has a crystal structure which has issues that come up in peer review, the authors and the authors ALONE have to justify the data. If none of the authors of said paper can do this and have to go to the crystallographer for interpretation of the data the crystallographer collected, then the crystallographer damn well better be an author on that paper; otherwise, it is a breach of scientific ethics to withhold authorship on select individuals. In other words, if you, as the scientist and co-author, can’t verify the crystal data, then SOMEONE ELSE on that paper must be able to.