Academic authorship

It has been suggested that Honorary authorship be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

Authorship of journal articles, books and other original works is a means by which academics communicate the results of their scholarly work, establish priority for their discoveries, and build their reputation among their peers. Authorship is a primary basis on which many academics are evaluated for employment, promotion, and tenure. In academic publishing, authorship of a work is claimed by those making intellectual contributions to the completion of the research described in the work. In simple cases, a solitary scholar carries out a research project and writes the subsequent article or book. In many disciplines, however, collaboration is the norm and issues of authorship can be controversial. In these contexts, authorship can encompass activities other than writing the article; a researcher who comes up with an experimental design and analyzes the data may be considered an author, even if he had little role in composing the text describing the results. According to some standards, even writing the entire article would not constitute authorship unless the writer was also involved in at least one other phase of the project.^[1]

What constitutes authorship?

Guidelines for assigning authorship vary between institutions and disciplines. They may be formally defined or simply cultural custom. Incorrect application of authorship rules occasionally leads to charges of academic misconduct and sanctions for the violator. A 2002 survey of a large sample of researchers who had received monies from the National Institutes of Health revealed that 10% of respondents claimed to have inappropriately assigned authorship credit within the last three years.^[2] This was the first large scale survey concerning such issues. In other fields only limited or no empirical data is available.

Authorship in Medicine

In the medical field, authorship is defined very narrowly. According to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, in order to be considered an author, one must have satisfied all three conditions:
1) Contributed substantially to the conception and design of the study, the acquisition of data, or the analysis and interpretation of data
2) Drafting or providing critical revision of the article,and
3) Provided final approval of the version to be published

The acquisition of funding, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship. Many medical journals have abandoned the strict notion of author, with the flexible notion of contributor.^[3]

Authorship in the Social Sciences

The American Psychological Association (APA) has similar guidelines as medicine for authorship. The APA acknowledge that authorship is not limited to the writing of manuscripts, but must include those who have made substantial contributions to a study such as "formulating the problem or hypothesis, structuring the experimental design, organizing and conducting the statistical analysis, interpreting the results, or writing a major portion of the paper" ^[4] While the APA guidelines list many other forms of contributions to a study that do not constitute authorship, it does state that combinations of these and other tasks may justify authorship. Like medicine, the APA considers institutional position, such as Department Chair, insufficient for attributing authorship.

Authorship in the Humanities

Neither the Modern Languages Association^[5] nor the Chicago Manual of Style^[6] define requirements for authorship.

Growing number of authors per paper

From the late 1600s to the 1920s, sole authorship was the unwritten rule, and the one-paper-one-author model worked well for distributing credit.^[7]

Today, collaboration is common in most academic disciplines, with the exception of the humanities, where sole authorship is still the predominant model. The rise of authorship has been attributed to Big Science -- scientific experiments that require collaboration and specialization of many individuals.^[8] Part of the rise may also be due to formally acknowledging those who would have remained unacknowledged in the past (such as graduate students and technicians), or to honorary authorship.

Papers listing more than 100 authors, once the domain of high-energy physics, are now common in medicine.^[9] Large, multi-center clinical trials are largely responsible for these papers and authorship is often used as a reward for recruiting patients. A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 reported on a clinical trial conducted in 1,081 hospitals in 15 different countries, involving a total of 41,021 patients. There were 972 authors listed in an appendix and authorship was assigned to a group.^[10]

In the summer of 2008, an article in high-energy physics was published describing the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 mile long particle accelerator that crosses the Swiss-French border. The article boasts 2,926 authors emanating from 169 research institutions.^[11]

Honorary authorship

Honorary authorship is sometimes granted to those who played no significant role in the work, for a variety of reasons. Until recently, it was standard for the head of a German department or institution to be listed as an author on a paper regardless of input.^[12] The National Academy of Sciences, however, warns that such practices "dilute the credit due the people who actually did the work, inflate the credentials of those so 'honored,' and make the proper attribution of credit more difficult." ^[13] To which extent such practices are still in place, is not empirically known. However, it is plausible to expect that they are still widespread, because senior scientists leading large research groups can receive much of their reputation from a long publication list and thus have little motivation to give up honorary authorships.

A possible measure against honorary authorships has been implemented by some scientific journals, in particular by the Nature journals. They demand ^[14] that each new manuscript must include a statement of responsibility that specifies the contribution of every author. The level of detail varies between the disciplines. Senior persons may still make some vague claim to have "supervised the project", for example, even if they were only in the formal position of a supervisor without having delivered concrete contributions. (The truth content of such statements is usually not checked by independent persons.) However, the need to describe contributions can at least be expected to somewhat reduce honorary authorships. In addition, it may help to identify the perpetrator in a case of scientific fraud.

Ghost authorship

Ghost authorship occurs when an individual makes a substantial contribution to the research but is not listed as an author. Ghost authorship has been linked to partnerships between industry and higher education. Two-thirds of industry-initiated randomized trials may have evidence of ghost authorship.^[15] Ghost authorship is considered problematic especially because it may be used to obscure the participation of researchers with conflicts of interest.^[16]

Litigation against the pharmaceutical company, Merck over health concerns related to use of their drug, Rofecoxib (brand name Vioxx), revealed explicit examples of ghost authorship.^[17] Merck routinely prepared journal manuscripts and subsequently recruited external, academically affiliated researchers to be the authors.

Authors are sometimes included in a list without their permission.^[18] Even if this is done with the benign intention to acknowledge some contributions, it is problematic since authors carry responsibility for correctness and thus need to have the opportunity to check the manuscript and possibly demand changes.

Order of authors in a list

Rules for the order of multiple authors in a list vary significantly from field to field, though they are more often consistent within a field of research.^[19] Some fields list authors in order of their degree of involvement in the work, with the most active contributors listed first. Others list them alphabetically.^[20] Biologists tend to place a supervisor or lab head last in an author list; organic chemists might put him or her first.^[12]

Although listing authors in order of the involvement in the project seems straighforward, it often leads to conflict. A study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that more than two-thirds of 919 corresponding authors disagreed with their coauthors regarding contributions of each author.^[21]

Responsibility of authors and of coauthors

Many guidelines and customs specify that all co-authors should be able to understand and support the major points of the paper. An author's reputation can be damaged when he allows his name to be used on paper he does not completely understand or was not intimately involved with. In a prominent case, an American stem cell researcher had his name listed on paper that was later revealed to be fraudulent. Although the researcher is not accused of participating in the fraud, a panel at his university found that "his failure to more closely oversee research with his name on it does make him guilty of 'research misbehavior.'"^[22]

All authors, including coauthors, are usually expected to have made reasonable attempts to check findings submitted for publication. In some cases coauthors of faked research have been accused of inappropriate behavior or research misconduct for failing to verify reports authored by others or by a commercial sponsor. Examples include the case of Gerald Schatten who co-authored with Hwang Woo-Suk, the case of Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain who co-authored papers with Malcolm Pearce (see [3]), and the coauthors with Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Laboratories. More recent cases include Charles Nemeroff,^[23] then the editor-in-chief of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the so-called Sheffield Actonel affair.^[24]

Additionally, authors are expected to keep all study data for later examination even after publication. Both scientific and academic censure can result from a failure to keep primary data; the case of Dr. Ranjit Chandra of Memorial University of Newfoundland provides an example of this.^[25] Many scientific journals also require that authors provide information to allow readers to determine whether the authors may have commercial or non-commercial conflicts of interest. Outlined in the author disclosure statement for the American Journal of Human Biology^[26], this is a policy more common in scientific fields where funding often comes from corporate sources. Authors are also commonly required to provide information about ethical aspects of research, particularly where research involves human or animal participants or use of biological material. Provision of incorrect information to journals may be regarded as misconduct. Financial pressures on universities have encouraged this type of misconduct. The majority of recent cases of alleged misconduct involving undisclosed conflicts of interest or failure of the authors to have seen scientific data involve collaborative research between scientists and biotechnology companies.^[27]

Anonymous and unclaimed authorship

Authors occasionally forego claiming authorship, for a number of reasons. Historically some authors have published anonymously to shield themselves when presenting controversial claims. A key example is Robert Chambers' anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a speculative, pre-Darwinian work on the origins of life and the cosmos. The book argued for an evolutionary view of life in the same spirit as the late Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck had long been discredited among intellectuals by this time and evolutionary (or development) theories were exceedingly unpopular, except among the political radicals, materialists, and atheists - Chambers hoped to avoid Lamarck's fate.

In the eighteenth century, Émilie du Châtelet began her career as a scientific author by submitting a paper in an annual competition held by the Paris Academy of Science; papers in this competition were submitted anonymously. Initially presenting her work without claiming authorship allowed her to have her work judged by established scientists while avoiding the bias against women in the sciences. She did not win the competition, but eventually her paper was published alongside the winning submissions, under her real name.^[28]

Scientists and engineers working in corporate and military organizations are often restricted from publishing and claiming authorship of their work because their results are considered secret property of the organization that employs them. One account describes the frustration of physicists working in nuclear weapons programs at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory - years after making a discovery they would read of the same phenomenon being "discovered" by a physicist unaware of the original, secret discovery of the phenomenon.^[29]

Further reading

• Molla, M., Gardner, T. 2007. Roll Credits: Sometimes the Authorship Byline Isn’t Enough. [4] - a proposal to reform academic authorship along the line of film credits

References