This article seeks to address and dispel some of the popular myths and misconceptions surrounding authorship of a scientific publication as this is often misconstrued by beginners in academia especially those in the developing world. While ethical issues in publishing related to authorship have been increasingly discussed, not much has been written about the myths and misconceptions of who might be an author. Dispelling these myths and misconceptions would go a long way in shaping the thoughts and plans of students, (...) junior faculty and researchers in academia especially in the developing world. (shrink)

Multiple inherent biases related to different citation practices (for e.g., self-citations, negative citations, wrong citations, multi-authorship-biased citations, honorary citations, circumstantial citations, discriminatory citations, selective and arbitrary citations, etc.) make citation-based bibliometrics strongly flawed and defective measures. A paper can be highly cited for a while (for e.g., under circumstantial or transitional knowledge), but years later it may appear that its findings, paradigms, or theories were untrue or invalid anymore. By contrast, a paper may remain shelved or overlooked for years or (...) decades, but new studies or discoveries may actualize its subject at any moment. As citation-based metrics are transformed into "commercial activities," the "citation credit" should be considered on a commercial basis too, in the sense that "citation credit" should be shared out as a "citation dividend" by shareholders (coauthors) averagely or proportionally to their contributions but not fully appropriated by each of them. At equal numbers of citations, the greater number of authors, the lower "citation credit" should be and vice versa. Overlooking the presence of distorted and subjective citation practices makes many people and administrators "obsessed" with the number of citations to such an extent to run after "highly cited" authors and to create specialized citation databases for commercial purposes. Citation-based bibliometrics, however, are unreliable and unscientific measures; citation counts do not mean that a more cited work is of a higher quality or accuracy than a less cited work because citations do not measure the quality or accuracy. Citations do not mean that a highly cited author or journal is more commendable than a less cited author or journal. Citations are not more than countable numbers: no more, no less. (shrink)

This article seeks to address and dispel some of the popular myths and misconceptions surrounding authorship of a scientific publication as this is often misconstrued by beginners in academia especially those in the developing world. While ethical issues in publishing related to authorship have been increasingly discussed, not much has been written about the myths and misconceptions of who might be an author. Dispelling these myths and misconceptions would go a long way in shaping the thoughts and plans of students, (...) junior faculty and researchers in academia especially in the developing world. (shrink)

In health sciences, technical contributions may be undervalued and excluded in the author byline. In this paper, I demonstrate how authorship is a historical construct which perpetuates systemic injustices including technical undervaluation. I make use of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual work to demonstrate how the power dynamics at play in academia make it very challenging to change the habitual state or “habitus”. To counter this, I argue that we must reconceive technical contributions to not be a priori less important based on (...) its nature when assigning roles and opportunities leading to authorship. I make this argument based on two premises. First, science has evolved due to major information and biotechnological innovation; this requires ‘technicians’ to acquire and exercise a commensurate high degree of both technical and intellectual expertise which in turn increases the value of their contribution. I will illustrate this by providing a brief historical view of work statisticians, computer programmers/data scientists and laboratory technicians. Second, excluding or undervaluing this type of work is contrary to norms of responsibility, fairness and trustworthiness of the individual researchers and of teams in science. Although such norms are continuously tested because of power dynamics, their importance is central to ethical authorship practice and research integrity. While it may be argued that detailed disclosure of contributions (known as contributorship) increases accountability by clearly identifying who did what in the publication, I contend that this may unintentionally legitimize undervaluation of technical roles and may decrease integrity of science. Finally, this paper offers recommendations to promote ethical inclusion of technical contributors. (shrink)

The article at hand presents the results of a literature review on the ethical issues related to scientific authorship. These issues are understood as questions and/or concerns about obligations, values or virtues in relation to reporting, authorship and publication of research results. For this purpose, the Web of Science core collection was searched for English resources published between 1945 and 2018, and a total of 324 items were analyzed. Based on the review of the documents, ten ethical themes have been (...) identified, some of which entail several ethical issues. Ranked on the basis of their frequency of occurrence these themes are: 1) attribution, 2) violations of the norms of authorship, 3) bias, 4) responsibility and accountability, 5) authorship order, 6) citations and referencing, 7) definition of authorship, 8) publication strategy, 9) originality, and 10) sanctions. In mapping these themes, the current article explores major ethical issue and provides a critical discussion about the application of codes of conduct, various understandings of culture, and contributing factors to unethical behavior. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the attitudes and reactions of researchers towards an authorship claim made by a researcher in a position of authority who has not made any scientific contribution to a manuscript or helped to write it. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 33 researchers at three seniority levels working in biomedicine and the life sciences in Switzerland. This manuscript focuses on the analysis of participants’ responses when presented with a vignette describing an (...) authorship assignment dilemma within a research group. The analysis indicates that researchers use a variety of explanations and arguments to justify inclusion of what guidelines would describe as honorary or guest authorship. Fuzzy parameters such as “substantial contribution” lead to varied interpretation and consequently convenient application of authorship guidelines in practice. Factors such as the culture of the research group, the values and practice shaped by the research leaders, the hierarchy and relative positions of power within research institutions, and the importance given to publications as the currency for academic success and growth tend to have a strong influence on authorship practice. Unjustified authorship assignment practices can be reduced to some extent by creating empowering research cultures where each researcher irrespective of his/her career stage feels empowered to confidently raise concerns without fearing adverse impact on their professional lives. However, individual researchers and research institutions currently have limited influence on established methods for evaluating academic success, which is primarily based on the number of high impact publications. (shrink)

With the growth of research collaborations, the average number of authors per article and the phenomenon of equally important authorships have increased. The essence of the phenomenon of equally important authorships is the approximately equal importance of authors, both because of the difficulties in comparing authors’ contributions to a paper and some actual research evaluation practices, which give full paper credit only to the most important authors. A mechanism for indicating that various authors contributed equally is required to maintain and (...) strengthen collaboration. However, the phenomenon of multiple important authors can cause unfair comparisons among the research contributions and abilities of authors of different papers. This loophole may be exploited. Normalizing the credit assigned to a given paper’s authors is an easy way to solve this ethical dilemma. This approach enables fair comparisons of the contributions by the authors of different articles and suppresses unethical behaviour in author listings. Bibliometric researchers have proposed mature methods of normalized paper credit assignment that would be easy to use given the current level of computer adoption. (shrink)

Responsible conduct of research and ethical publishing practices are debatable issues in the higher education literature. The literature suggests that ‘authorship disputes’ are associated with multi-author paper publication and linked to ethical publishing practices. A few research studies argue authorship matters of a multi-author paper publication, but do not explain how to arrange author list meaningfully in a multi-author paper. How is a principal author of a multi-author paper to be decided? The literature also does not clarify whether language editor (...) could claim authorship for a research paper publication? The paper adopts qualitative methodology that subsumes descriptive, evaluative, and interpretative approaches to answer these questions. While answering these questions, the paper critically examines ‘authorship disputes’ and ‘types of authorship’ relating to research paper publication practices. At the end, the paper proposes a framework that would help to resolve authorship disputes over multi-author paper publication. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the attitudes and reactions of researchers towards an authorship claim made by a researcher in a position of authority who has not made any scientific contribution to a manuscript or helped to write it. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 33 researchers at three seniority levels working in biomedicine and the life sciences in Switzerland. This manuscript focuses on the analysis of participants’ responses when presented with a vignette describing an (...) authorship assignment dilemma within a research group. The analysis indicates that researchers use a variety of explanations and arguments to justify inclusion of what guidelines would describe as honorary or guest authorship. Fuzzy parameters such as “substantial contribution” lead to varied interpretation and consequently convenient application of authorship guidelines in practice. Factors such as the culture of the research group, the values and practice shaped by the research leaders, the hierarchy and relative positions of power within research institutions, and the importance given to publications as the currency for academic success and growth tend to have a strong influence on authorship practice. Unjustified authorship assignment practices can be reduced to some extent by creating empowering research cultures where each researcher irrespective of his/her career stage feels empowered to confidently raise concerns without fearing adverse impact on their professional lives. However, individual researchers and research institutions currently have limited influence on established methods for evaluating academic success, which is primarily based on the number of high impact publications. (shrink)