Authorship climate: A new tool for studying ethical issues in authorship

ABSTRACT

Authorship of academic publications is central to scientists’ careers, but decisions about how to include and order authors on publications are often fraught with difficult ethical issues. To better understand scholars’ experiences with authorship, we developed a novel concept, authorship climate, which assesses perceptions of the procedural, informational, and distributive justice associated with authorship decisions. We conducted a representative survey of more than 3,000 doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and assistant professors from a stratified random sample of U.S. biology, economics, physics, and psychology departments. We found that individuals who tend to have more power on science teams perceived authorship climate to be more positive than those who tend to have less power. Alphabetical approaches for assigning authorship were associated with higher perceptions of procedural justice and informational justice but lower perceptions of distributive justice. Individuals with more marginalized identities also tended to perceive authorship climate more negatively than those with no marginalized identities. These results illustrate how the concept of authorship climate can facilitate enhanced understanding of early-career scholars’ authorship experiences, and they highlight potential steps that can be taken to promote more positive authorship experiences for scholars of all identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• empirical studies of research ethics
• publication ethics
• authorship climate
• organizational justice
• organizational and institutional ethics
• diversity
• equity
• inclusion in science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authorship statement

HD and KCE conceptualized the paper, and KCE led the writing process. All authors participated in framing the paper, interpreting results, and writing and editing the manuscript. HD and IS led the data collection and analysis, with assistance from TD and LN. KSC, KCE, GM, and IS obtained funding, and KSC and IS administered the project.

Notes

1. Some sub-fields of physics (e.g., high-energy particle physics) can have papers with thousands of authors (Birnholtz 2006), which has the potential to generate unique challenges and authorship climate perceptions. As noted in the main text, the number of authors does not appear to be the only factor associated with lower distributive justice perceptions in our survey, but it would be valuable in further research to look more closely at the unique characteristics of different disciplines and their sub-fields to explore their impact on authorship climate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSF [HRD-ECR-1954767 and HRD-ECR-2000579].