Through authorship, researchers, assistants, interns, students, and other involved parties (e.g., citizen scientists, academic consortia) receive credit for their contributions and can be held responsible and accountable for the quality and integrity of the work.
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 she or he had little role in composing the text describing the results.
A 2002 survey of a large sample of researchers who had received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health revealed that 10% of respondents claimed to have inappropriately assigned authorship credit within the last three years.
The natural sciences have no universal standard for authorship, but some major multi-disciplinary journals and institutions have established guidelines for work that they publish.
"[8] In particular types of research, including particle physics, genome sequencing and clinical trials, a paper's author list can run into the hundreds.
In 1998, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) adopted a (at that time) highly unorthodox policy for assigning authorship.
[20] 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.
[22] Large authors lists have attracted some criticism and are believed to negatively affect all existing ethical issues of authorship.
Such a system treats authorship more as credit for scientific service at the facility in general rather that as an identification of specific contributions.
-index correlates with winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities.
This problem is openly acknowledged, and it could easily be "corrected" by dividing each paper and its citations by the number of authors,[31][32] though this practice has not been widely adopted.
[34][35][36] Historically, biologists tended to place a principal investigator (supervisor or lab head) last in an author list whereas organic chemists might have put him or her first.
[citation needed][41] Numerous guidelines and customs specify that all co-authors must be able to understand and support a paper's major points.
[citation needed] In a notable case, American stem-cell researcher Gerald Schatten had his name listed on a paper co-authored with Hwang Woo-suk.
The paper was later exposed as fraudulent and, though Schatten was 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.
'"[42] All authors, including co-authors, are usually expected to have made reasonable attempts to check findings submitted for publication.
Both scientific and academic censure can result from a failure to keep primary data; the case of Ranjit Chandra of Memorial University of Newfoundland provides an example of this.
Outlined in the author disclosure statement for the American Journal of Human Biology,[48] this is a policy more common in scientific fields where funding often comes from corporate sources.
However, it is plausible to expect that it is 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.
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.
Ghost authorship occurs when an individual makes a substantial contribution to the research or the writing of the report, but is not listed as an author.
[54] Litigation against the pharmaceutical company, Merck over health concerns related to use of their drug, Rofecoxib (brand name Vioxx), revealed examples of ghost authorship.
[55] Merck routinely paid medical writing companies to prepare journal manuscripts, and subsequently recruited external, academically affiliated researchers to pose as the authors.
[56] 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.
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.
One notable example is that of William Sealy Gosset, who was forced to publish his work in statistics under the pseudonym "Student" due to his employment at the Guinness brewery.
While group authorships can reduce conflicts over authorship order and the criteria for including or excluding individuals, they also presents challenges, such as ethical concerns over credit and responsibility, legal issues related to copyright, and technical difficulties due to the absence of persistent identifiers such as ORCID for groups.
[65] Some argue that equal co-authorship helps resolve tensions and offers fair recognition of significant contributions, especially in collaborative projects.
[67] The inconsistent recognition of equal co-authorship by journals and academic institutions, along with the lack of standardized policies, further complicates its evaluation in tenure, promotion, and funding decisions.
[68] Artificial intelligence systems have been credited with authorship on a handful of academic publications,[69] however, many publishers disallow this on the grounds that "they cannot take responsibility for the content and integrity of scientific papers".