Influences on Authorship Issues: An Evaluation of Giving Credit

Abstract

A survey on authorship issues was conducted with academic chemists in Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States. Six hundred faculty members responded. The respondents reported a wide range in their attitudes and behavior regarding giving credit in a publication. The various guidelines for authorship are independent of academic background factors such as the relationship between the senior author and the contributor-potential author. However, the survey data reveal significant context-dependency by the respondents. Many respondents would give more credit to their own student than to another professor's student for the exact same contribution to a research project. The survey data further shows that the faculty who received their Ph.D. in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s are the most likely to provide authorship, while those who received their Ph.D. in the 1990s and 2000s would most likely give either no credit or acknowledgments.

Keywords:

• acknowledgment
• authorship
• ghost author
• guest author
• publication
• responsible conduct of research
• RCR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank R. Kirk Jonas, Chair of the University of Richmond Institutional Review Board, for his continuing prompt and thorough assistance. We thank Larry D. Claxton, Roald Hoffmann, Carol E. Jones, Frank Macrina, Chris McCarty, William H. Myers, Gary H. Posner, David B. Resnik, Loren Shea, Judy Stamberg, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments.

Notes

Garfield, E. (1982). More on the ethics of scientific publication: Abuses of authorship attribution and citation amnesia undermine the reward system of science. Current Contents, Number 30 (July 26): 5–10; also published in Garfield, E. (1981–82). Essays of an Information Scientist, 5: 621–626.