Honorary Authorship Practices in Environmental Science Teams: Structural and Cultural Factors and Solutions

ABSTRACT

Overinclusive authorship practices such as honorary or guest authorship have been widely reported, and they appear to be exacerbated by the rise of large interdisciplinary collaborations that make authorship decisions particularly complex. Although many studies have reported on the frequency of honorary authorship and potential solutions to it, few have probed how the underlying dynamics of large interdisciplinary teams contribute to the problem. This article reports on a qualitative study of the authorship standards and practices of six National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary environmental science teams. Using interviews of the lead principal investigator and an early-career member on each team, our study explores the nature of honorary authorship practices as well as some of the motivating factors that may contribute to these practices. These factors include both structural elements (policies and procedures) and cultural elements (values and norms) that cross organizational boundaries. Therefore, we provide recommendations that address the intersection of these factors and that can be applied at multiple organizational levels.

KEYWORDS:

• honorary authorship
• inclusive research practices
• interdisciplinary teams
• research ethics
• team science

Acknowledgments

Claire Gonyo contributed to this project as a research assistant who helped to design the interview questions and conduct the interviews.

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant SES-1449466 to KCE, IHS, GMM, KSC, and PAS and by EF-1065786 to KSC and PAS.

Notes

¹ Gift authorship and guest authorship are sometimes distinguished, with gift authorship focusing on the addition of authors in order to improve the appearance of their research output and guest authorship focusing on the addition of authors in order to increase the likelihood for a paper to be published (da Silva and Dobránszki, 2015). For the purposes of this paper, the term “honorary authorship” will be used to describe any circumstance in which authors are added to a publication despite not fulfilling the criteria for authorship.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant SES-1449466 to KCE, IHS, GMM, KSC, and PAS and by EF-1065786 to KSC and PAS.