Bülow and Helgesson discussed the practice of gift/honorary authorships and expounded on a most devious form of these, termed ‘hostage authorship’. The authors drew a parallel of such situations in research and publishing with the problem of ‘dirty hands’. In this case, acceding, albeit with regrets, may well be ‘… what we ought to do, even if it requires us to do something that is intrinsically bad’, especially if ‘this is both practically necessary and proportionate to the end’. Here, I (...) caution against this being a morally cogent, normative course of action. Tangible benefits from research not yet performed or published could not be predicted with any certainty, and as such could not be deemed sufficiently important to override moral constraints of justice and fairness. The utilitarian argument for any measure of beneficence with ‘dirty hands’ could therefore be nothing more than a self-serving act, or a self-exonerating form of moral disengagement. Such actions could have lasting ill effects on junior... (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 24-26, October 2011.

Authorship is commonly used as the basis for the measurement of research productivity. It influences career progression and rewards, making it a valued commodity in a competitive scientific environment. To better understand authorship practices amongst collaborative teams, this study surveyed authors on collaborative journal articles published between 2011 and 2015. Of the 8364 respondents, 1408 responded to the final open-ended question, which solicited additional comments or remarks regarding the fair distribution of authorship in research teams. This paper presents the analysis (...) of these comments, categorized into four main themes: disagreements, questionable behavior, external influences regarding authorship, and values promoted by researchers. Results suggest that some respondents find ways to effectively manage disagreements in a collegial fashion. Conversely, others explain how distribution of authorship can become a “blood sport” or a “horror story” which can negatively affect researchers’ wellbeing, scientific productivity and integrity. Researchers fear authorship discussions and often try to avoid openly discussing the situation which can strain team interactions. Unethical conduct is more likely to result from deceit, favoritism, and questionable mentorship and may become more egregious when there is constant bullying and discrimination. Although values of collegiality, transparency and fairness were promoted by researchers, rank and need for success often overpowered ethical decision-making. This research provides new insight into contextual specificities related to fair authorship distribution that can be instrumental in developing applicable training tools to identify, prevent, and mitigate authorship disagreement. (shrink)

Scientific authorship serves to identify and acknowledge individuals who “contribute significantly” to published research. However, specific authorship norms and practices often differ within and across disciplines, labs, and cultures. As a consequence, authorship disagreements are commonplace in team research. This study aims to better understand the prevalence of authorship disagreements, those factors that may lead to disagreements, as well as the extent and nature of resulting misbehavior. Methods include an international online survey of researchers who had published from 2011 to (...) 2015. Of the 6673 who completed the main questions pertaining to authorship disagreement and misbehavior, nearly half reported disagreements regarding authorship naming; and discipline, rank, and gender had significant effects on disagreement rates. Paradoxically, researchers in multidisciplinary teams that typically reflect a range of norms and values, were less likely to have faced disagreements regarding authorship. Respondents reported having witnessed a wide range of misbehavior including: instances of hostility, undermining of a colleague’s work during meetings/talks, cutting corners on research, sabotaging a colleague’s research, or producing fraudulent work to be more competitive. These findings suggest that authorship disputes may contribute to an unhealthy competitive dynamic that can undermine researchers’ wellbeing, team cohesion, and scientific integrity. (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)

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)

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)

In the last 20 years, there has been a sharp increase in the incidence of retractions of articles published in scientific journals, the majority of which are due to research misconduct. In some cases, researchers have revised and republished articles that were retracted due to misconduct, which raises some novel questions concerning authorship. Suppose that an article is retracted because one of the authors fabricated or falsified some data, but the researchers decide to salvage the useable data, make appropriate revisions, (...) and resubmit the article for publication. If the person who committed misconduct has made a significant contribution to the research reported in the revised paper, should they be named as an author to recognize this contribution or should they be denied authorship because they committed misconduct? This is a challenging issue because it involves the confluence of two research ethics domains that are usually dealt with separately, i.e., resolution of authorship disputes and adjudication of misconduct findings, as well as potential conflicts among norms that underlie authorship practices and misconduct adjudication. In this paper, we describe some actual cases involving articles that were retracted for misconduct and republished; review policies from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Committee on Publication Ethics, and top fifteen biomedical journals to determine whether they provide adequate guidance for cases like these; and analyze the ethical and policy issues that may arise in these situations. (shrink)

Attitudes to, and practices of, scientific authorship vary. We have studied this variation among researchers in a university hospital and medical school in Norway.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 26-27, October 2011.

Scientists of many countries in which English is not the primary language routinely use a variety of manuscript preparation, correction or editing services, a practice that is openly endorsed by many journals and scientific institutions. These services vary tremendously in their scope; at one end there is simple proof-reading, and at the other extreme there is in-depth and extensive peer-reviewing, proposal preparation, statistical analyses, re-writing and co-writing. In this paper, the various types of service are reviewed, along with authorship guidelines, (...) and the question is raised of whether the high-end services surpass most guidelines’ criteria for authorship. Three other factors are considered. First, the ease of collaboration possible in the internet era allows multiple iterations between the author(s) and the “editing service”, so essentially, papers can be co-written. Second, “editing services” often offer subject-specific experts who comment not only on the language, but interpret and improve scientific content. Third, the trend towards heavily multi-authored papers implies that the threshold necessary to earn authorship is declining. The inevitable conclusion is that at some point the contributions by “editing services” should be deemed sufficient to warrant authorship. Trying to enforce any guidelines would likely be futile, but nevertheless, it might be time to revisit the ethics of using some of the high-end “editing services”. In an increasingly international job market, awareness of this problem might prove increasingly important in authorship disputes, the allocation of research grants, and hiring decisions. (shrink)

Relying on data collected by the Zurich Survey of Academics, a unique representative online survey among academics in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, this paper replicates Johann and Mayer's :175–196, 2019) analysis of researchers' perceptions of scientific authorship and expands their scope. The primary goals of the study at hand are to learn more about country differences in perceptions of scientific authorship, as well as the influence of perceived publication pressure on authorship perceptions. The results indicate that academics in Switzerland interpret (...) scientific authorship more leniently than their colleagues in Germany and Austria. The findings further indicate that, as perceived pressure to publish increases, researchers are more likely to belong to a group of academics who hold the view that any type of contribution/task justifies co-authorship, including even those contributions/tasks that do not justify co-authorship according to most authorship guidelines. In summary, the present study suggests that action is required to harmonize regulations for scientific authorship and to improve the research culture. (shrink)

An update of the widely acknowledged recommendations on how to handle authorship in research, issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, was issued in August, 2013. While the revised recommendations contain several clarifications compared to earlier versions, one arguably important aspect is still not addressed: the relationship between authorship and intellectual involvement in research. In this paper, it is argued that the ICMJE authorship criteria are flawed in this respect: they do not explicitly require of authors of scientific (...) papers that they do research. It is further suggested that unless academic authorship clearly reflects to what extent individual researchers have been intellectually involved in the research and to what extent they have merely contributed with research-related work, they will, in many cases, be misleading about research merits. (shrink)

This paper concerns the responsibility of co-authors in cases of scientific misconduct. Arguments in research integrity guidelines and in the bioethics literature concerning authorship responsibilities are discussed. It is argued that it is unreasonable to claim that for every case where a research paper is found to be fraudulent, each author is morally responsible for all aspects of that paper, or that one particular author has such a responsibility. It is further argued that it is more constructive to specify what (...) task responsibilities come with different roles in a project and describe what kinds of situations or events call for some kind of action, and what the appropriate actions might be. (shrink)

Although the authorship order on published research plays a significant role for scientific merit in many research contexts, and therefore should be handled with great care not least for the sake o...

We propose a rational method for addressing an important question—who deserves to be an author of a scientific article? We review various contentious issues associated with this question and recommend that the scientific community should view authorship in terms of contributions and responsibilities, rather than credits. We propose a new paradigm that conceptually divides a scientific article into four basic elements: ideas, work, writing, and stewardship. We employ these four fundamental elements to modify the well-known International Committee of Medical Journal (...) Editors (ICMJE) authorship guidelines. The modified ICMJE guidelines are then used as the basis to develop an approach to quantify individual contributions and responsibilities in multi-author articles. The outcome of the approach is an authorship matrix, which can be used to answer several nagging questions related to authorship. (shrink)

While much of the scholarly work on ethics relating to academic authorship examines the fair distribution of authorship credit, none has yet examined situations where a researcher contributes significantly to the project, but whose contributions do not make it into the final manuscript. Such a scenario is commonplace in collaborative research settings in many disciplines and may occur for a number of reasons, such as excluding research in order to provide the paper with a clearer focus, tell a particular story, (...) or exclude negative results that do not fit the hypothesis. Our concern in this paper is less about the reasons for including or excluding data from a paper and more about distributing credit in this type of scenario. In particular, we argue that the notion ‘substantial contribution’, which is part of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) authorship criteria, is ambiguous and that we should ask whether it concerns what ends up in the paper or what is a substantial contribution to the research process leading up to the paper. We then argue, based on the principles of fairness, due credit, and ensuring transparency and accountability in research, that the latter interpretation is more plausible from a research ethics point of view. We conclude that the ICMJE and other organizations interested in authorship and publication ethics should consider including guidance on authorship attribution in situations where researchers contribute significantly to the research process leading up to a specific paper, but where their contribution is finally omitted. (shrink)

This article discusses gift authorship, the practice where co-authorship is awarded to a person who has not contributed significantly to the study. From an ethical point of view, gift authorship raises concerns about desert, fairness, honesty and transparency, and its prevalence in research is rightly considered a serious ethical concern. We argue that even though misuse of authorship is always bad, there are instances where accepting requests of gift authorship may nevertheless be the right thing to do. More specifically, we (...) propose that researchers may find themselves in a situation much similar to the problem of dirty hands, which has been frequently discussed in political philosophy and applied ethics. The problem of dirty hands is relevant to what we call hostage authorship, where the researchers include undeserving authors unwillingly, and only because they find it unavoidable in order to accomplish a morally important research goal. (shrink)

Increasing attention and efforts are being put towards engaging patients in health research, and some have even argued that patient engagement in research is an ethical imperative. Yet there is relatively little empirical data on ethical issues associated with PER. A three-round Delphi survey was conducted with a panel of early-career researchers involved in PER. One of the objectives was to examine the ethical dimensions of PER as well as ECRs’ self-perceived level of preparedness to conduct PER ethically. The study (...) was conducted among awardees of the Québec SPOR-SUPPORT Unit in Canada, who represent the next generation of researchers involved in PER. Many themes were addressed throughout the study, such as definition, values, patients’ roles, expected characteristics of patients, and anticipated challenges. Open-ended questions were used, and all quantitative data were collected through statements using 7-point Likert scales. Between April and November 2016, 25 ECRs were invited to participate; 18 completed both the first and second rounds, and 16 completed the third round. Panelists consisted of nine women and seven men with various backgrounds. The majority were between 25 and 44 years old. Panelists’ responses showed PER raises important ethical issues: 1) professionalization of patients involved in research ; 2) adequate remuneration of patients; 3) fair recognition of patients’ experiential knowledge; and 4) tokenism. While the panelists felt moderately prepared to confront these ethical issues, they reported being uncomfortable applying for an ethics certificate for a PER project. If PER is an ethical imperative, it is vital to establish clear ethical standards and to train and support the PER community to identify and resolve ethical issues. Despite their overall readiness to conduct PER, panelists did not feel adequately prepared to address many of these issues. It is not easy for ECRs to reconcile ethical desiderata and logistical imperatives. Additional research should focus on supporting the responsible conduct of PER, which, if not done, can undermine the credibility and feasibility of the entire PER enterprise. (shrink)