Responsible Authorship: Why Researchers Must Forgo Honorary Authorship

Abstract

Although widespread throughout the biomedical sciences, the practice of honorary authorship—the listing of authors who fail to merit inclusion as authors by authorship criteria—has received relatively little sustained attention. Is there something wrong with honorary authorship, or is it only a problem when used in conjunction with other unethical authorship practices like ghostwriting? Numerous sets of authorship guidelines discourage the practice, but its ubiquity throughout biomedicine suggests that there is a need to say more about honorary authorship. Despite its general acceptance among many scientists, honorary authorship is unethical. Even if burdensome, responsible researchers are obligated to forgo honorary authorship.

Keywords:

• accountability
• authorship
• honorary authorship
• research ethics

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Carl Elliott, Trisha Phillips, Robert Thompson, Greig Mulberry, the participants of the 2008 Mississippi Philosophical Association meeting, two anonymous reviews, and David Resnik for their valuable feedback.

There are no competing interests.

Notes

1. Of course, as an anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed out, we should be somewhat skeptical of the existing current empirical work on honorary authorship. On collaborative projects, people tend to feel that their own contributions are more important and their colleagues' less important. Surveys could be in part reflecting this fact. In addition, many authors are not in a place to know about the contributions of others and may feel like those contributions are unearned when in fact they are. I agree that more empirical work is needed, but it is still a safe bet that honorary authorship exists and is relatively common.

2. An anonymous reviewer kindly suggested these two points.

3. An anonymous reviewer helpfully raised this concern.