Authorship of articles, books and other original works 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 very common in some and issues of authorship are sometimes complex and 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. Look up tenure in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. ... Research is a human activity based on intellectual investigation and aimed at discovering, interpreting, and revising human knowledge on different aspects of the world. ... This is a list of academic disciplines (and academic fields). ... Collaboration is a process defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge[1] and mutual learning between two or more people working together[2] toward a common goal typically creative in nature. ...

What constitutes authorship?

Guidelines for assigning authorship vary between institutions and disciplines. They may be formally defined or simply customary. Incorrect application of authorship rules occasionally leads to charges of academic misconduct and sanctions for the violator. In one study, disputed authorship was the most commonly reported form of alleged misconduct. ^[1] Institutions are structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of two or more individuals. ... Academic dishonesty or academic misconduct is any type of cheating that occurs in relation to a formal academic exercise, such as on an exam or essay, usually committed by students. ...

Some major institutions have put forth guidelines for authorship. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors specifies that authors must have made a substantial intellectual contribution to a study's conception and design, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data. They must also have drafted or revised the article's intellectual content, and approved the final version. The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has an editorial policy that specifies "authorship should be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work" and furthermore, "authors are strongly encouraged to indicate their specific contributions" as a footnote. For other uses, see Data (disambiguation). ... Scientific journals are one type of academic journal An academic journal is a regularly-published, peer-reviewed publication that publishes scholarship relating to an academic discipline. ... A footnote is a note of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document. ...

Some papers will have quite a few authors. In genome sequencing and particle-physics collaborations, for example, a paper's author list can run into the hundreds. One commentator wrote, "In more than 25 years working as a scientific editor ... I have not been aware of any valid argument for more than three authors per paper, although I recognize that this may not be true for every field."^[2]

Authors are sometimes included in a list without their permission.^[3]

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 listed as an author on a paper regardless of input.^[4]

A phenomena termed ghost authorship is sometimes discussed in relation to industry initiated research. When an individual makes a substantial contribution to the research and is not listed as an author, he is considered a ghost author. Ghost authorship is considered problematic especially because it may be used to obscure the participation of researchers with conflicts of interest.^[1][5]

Claiming authorship twice for the same work (e.i. submission of findings to more than one journal) is usually regarded as misconduct, under what is known as the Ingelfinger rule, named after the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine 1967-1977, Franz Ingelfinger [3]. The New England Journal of Medicine (New Engl J Med or NEJM) is a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. ...

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. ^[6] 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.^[7] Biologists tend to place a supervisor or lab head last in an author list; organic chemists might put him or her first.^[8]

Responsibility of authors and of coauthors

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 work he 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.'"^[9]

All authors, including coauthors, are expected to have made reasonable attempts to check findings submitted to academic journals 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 the Pearce (see lessons from the Pearce affair), and the coauthors with Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Laboratories. More recent cases include the Charles Nemeroff, then the editor-in-chief of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the so-called Sheffield Actonel affair. Gerald P. Schatten is a stem cell researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. ... Hwang Woo-suk (황우석) (born 29 January 1953) is a South Korean biomedical scientist. ... Jan Hendrik Schön Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs (recipient of Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in...

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 a good example of this^[10]. Some scientific journals require that authors provide information to allow readers to determine whether the authors might have commercial or non-commercial conflicts of interest. 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 (Nemeroff, Blumsohn). Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra, OC, MD, is a world-renowned expert in the field of nutrition and immunology who has been accused of committing scientific fraud by the British Medical Journal. ... Memorial University of Newfoundland, (popularly known as Memorial University or MUN) is a comprehensive university located primarily in St. ...

See also

• Research ethics

Research ethics involves the application of fundamental ethical principles to a variety of topics involving scientific research. ...

Further reading

References