What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

Abstract

Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks. Arising from this, social scientific literature has especially discussed author orders and the distribution of publication and citation credits among co-authors in depth. Yet only a small fraction of the authorship literature has also addressed the actual underlying question of what actually constitutes authorship. To identify social scientists' motives for assigning authorship, we conduct an empirical study surveying researchers around the globe. We find that social scientists tend to distribute research tasks among (individual) research team members. Nevertheless, they generally adhere to the universally applicable Vancouver criteria when distributing authorship. More specifically, participation in every research task with the exceptions of data work as well as reviewing and remarking increases scholars' chances to receive authorship. Based on our results, we advise journal editors to introduce authorship guidelines that incorporate the Vancouver criteria as they seem applicable to the social sciences. We further call upon research institutions to emphasize data skills in hiring and promotion processes as publication counts might not always depict these characteristics.

Análisis de la participación española en los proyectos de investigación en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades dentro del VI Programa Marco de la Unión Europea (2002-2006)

“…Thus, it is usual to tackle a research question by independent researchers and even the results may be published in an edited volume with chapters written by single authors. Frequently, research collaboration in the Social Sciences and Humanities does not happen in a research team, but across the research field with independent researchers collaborating in dealing with a single research problem (Pruschak, 2021). However, these results refer to projects funded between 2002 and 2006.…”

Three steps to open science for qualitative research in psychology

“…Firstly, it ensures that members are recognised for contributions that are impossible to properly recognise when following the authorship model. Collaborative and multidisciplinary research is a recognised feature of qualitative research (Drenth, 1998; Erlen et al., 1997; Pruschak, 2021), and qualitative research is known to include a diverse range of approaches to data collection and analysis (see e.g., Madill & Gough, 2008). This includes research that benefits from the involvement of people unfamiliar with academia, for example, with allyship, co‐created research, and participatory action research (see e.g., Scholz et al., 2021).…”

“The person in power told me to”—European PhD students’ perspectives on guest authorship and good authorship practice

“…It is therefore important to understand how practicing researchers perceive deserved authorship, and how these perceptions differ across relevant factors like faculty, seniority and country. Unfortunately, the current literature stems largely from medical sciences, and the humanities, and social sciences (except psychology) are largely absent (exceptions include [ 16 – 18 ]). Further, very few studies compare across faculties [ 19 ].…”