The norms of authorship credit: Challenging the definition of authorship in The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity

ABSTRACT

The practice of assigning authorship for a scientific publication tends to raise two normative questions: 1) “who should be credited as an author?”; 2) “who should not be credited as an author but should still be acknowledged?”. With the publication of the revised version of The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ECCRI), standard answers to these questions have been called into question. This article examines the ways in which the ECCRI approaches these two questions and compares these approaches to standard definitions of “authorship” and “acknowledgment” in guidelines issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). In light of two scenarios and the problems posed by these kinds of “real-world” examples, we recommend specific revisions to the content of the ECCRI in order not only to provide a more detailed account of the tasks deserving of acknowledgment, but to improve the Code’s current definition of authorship.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• Acknowledgment
• Credit
• Responsibility
• Accountability

Acknowledgments

An early draft of this article was presented in September 2018 during the PUBMET conference held in Zadar University. We are immensely grateful to Richard Hill for helping us with the scenario about geological research. We also wish to thank and acknowledge the valuable feedback offered by the editor and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Both the WAME and the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology place an emphasis on intellectual/scientific contributions. In addition, both organizations do not consider manuscript preparation as a prerequisite for authorship. The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology notes that authorship encompasses “not only those who do the actual writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study. Substantial professional contributions may include formulating the problem or hypothesis, structuring the experimental design, organizing and conducting the statistical analysis, interpreting the results, or writing a major portion of the paper. Those who so contribute are listed in the byline” (Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 2019).

2. The Journal of Geophysical Research claims that “only individuals who have significantly contributed to the research and preparation of the article should be listed as authors. All of these coauthors share responsibility for submitted articles. While not all coauthors may be familiar with all aspects of the research presented in their article, each should have in place an appropriate process for reviewing the accuracy of the reported results” (American Geophysical Union 2006). Despite requiring all coauthors to share responsibility for the submitted article, the authorship guidelines issued by The Journal of Geophysical Research differ from those provided by the ICMJE in two important ways: firstly, because The Journal of Geophysical Research accepts that coauthors may not be familiar with all aspects of the research, then, by implication, authors cannot be accountable for all aspects of the work; secondly, in place of accountability, The Journal of Geophysical Research requires each author to facilitate “an appropriate process for reviewing the accuracy of the reported results”.