Unethical practices in authorship of scientific papers

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been an increase in the number of multi‐author papers within scientific journals. This increase, in combination with the pressure to publish within academia, has precipitated various unethical authorship practices within biomedical research. These include dilution of authorship responsibility, ‘guest’, ‘pressured’ and ‘ghost’ authorship, and obfuscation of authorship credit within by‐lines. Other authorship irregularities include divided and duplicate publication. This article discusses these problems and why the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors guidelines are failing to control them.

Ethical abuses in the authorship of scientific papers

“…One of the main pernicious consequences of papers with multiple authors is the dilution of responsibility (Bennett & Taylor 2003), which ultimately may result in lower quality of the paper. Inevitably, one can find studies in which neither the first author nor the other collaborators are capable of explaining the entire content of the paper, always attributing the more obscure parts of the paper to another author.…”

“…In addition to these authorship irregularities Bennett & Taylor (2003) recognize two other types of irregularities in connection to the publication of scientific papers: the publication of duplicate papers (often in two languages) and the divided publication. The duplicated publication refers to the publication of the same paper in various journals without any significant modification which would warrant another publication.…”

“…The researcher also guarantees his or her originality and their copyright by authorship. Because papers are fundamental to the development of science, the quantity of scientific publications is used as a criterion in hiring faculty, promotions in mid career, awarding funding, and scholarships for students, in addition to the advancement of an individual researcher and international peer recognition (Bennett & Taylor 2003). The quality of publications has also been adopted as a criterion in the last few years.…”

“…According to Bennett & Taylor (2003) there are several irregularities in scientific publications related to authorship (Fig. 1).…”

“…These problems have been steadily rising due to the overestimation of the number of publications an author has (Bennett & Taylor 2003). For example, in the United States most higher learning institutions consider the number of published papers a potential candidate for a faculty position has to be the main criterion for hiring, even when compared to a candidate with a comparatively superior ability to teach (Fleet et al 2006).…”