A review of the literature on ethical issues related to scientific authorship

ABSTRACT

The article at hand presents the results of a literature review on the ethical issues related to scientific authorship. These issues are understood as questions and/or concerns about obligations, values or virtues in relation to reporting, authorship and publication of research results. For this purpose, the Web of Science core collection was searched for English resources published between 1945 and 2018, and a total of 324 items were analyzed. Based on the review of the documents, ten ethical themes have been identified, some of which entail several ethical issues. Ranked on the basis of their frequency of occurrence these themes are: 1) attribution, 2) violations of the norms of authorship, 3) bias, 4) responsibility and accountability, 5) authorship order, 6) citations and referencing, 7) definition of authorship, 8) publication strategy, 9) originality, and 10) sanctions. In mapping these themes, the current article explores major ethical issue and provides a critical discussion about the application of codes of conduct, various understandings of culture, and contributing factors to unethical behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific authorship
• ethical issues
• virtues
• values
• obligations
• responsibilities

Acknowledgments

An early draft of this article was presented as a poster in June 2019 during the World Conference on Research Integrity held at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) in Hong Kong. Our traveling costs was covered by the EnTIRE Consortium (Mapping Normative Frameworks for EThics and Integrity of Research), which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 [Call: H2020-SwafS-2016-17 (Science with and for Society), Topic: SwafS-16-2016, Grant Agreement No. 741782]. The funders have not played a role in the design, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors wish to thank and acknowledge Jonathan Lewis for helpful comments on an early draft of the article. 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. For instance, while both studies mention guest/ghost authorship, they only mention the receipt of undeserved credit as a problematic issue about this practice and make no explicit mention of responsibilities.

2. Two specific examples can help to clarify the problem. 1) Marušić et al.’s third category of common issues in authorship is titled ethical and unethical authorship practices. Various forms of authorship abuse such as guest/ghost/honorary authorship are mentioned in this category, suggesting that these authorship abuses are examples of ethical issues in authorship. Later, however, in making a reference to one of the reviewed studies they note that “it can be argued that omitting or adding authors on an article represents falsification or fabrication” (Marušić, Bošnjak, and Jerončić 2011, 14). Given that fabrication and falsification are strictly forbidden by all codes of conduct, comparing ghost/guest authorship with them would imply that they are instances of noncompliance with codes of conduct and not an ethical issue in the strictest sense. 2) Claxton’s category of deceptive practices has two subcategories: Fraud, including fabrication of data and plagiarism, and, unethical conflict of interest. By making a distinction between unethical conflict of interests and other forms of conflict of interests, Claxton leaves the reader confused about the nature of conflicting interests. He notes that “the evaluation of scientific data and information is never ‘completely independent of the scientists’ convictions or theoretical apparatus’ and is, therefore, influenced by previous knowledge, beliefs, and experiences” (Claxton 2005b, 35). Unethical conflict of interests, however, are those that provide “an incentive for fraud and misconduct” (Claxton 2005b, 35). In other words, according to Claxton, conflict of interests are inseparable from scientific endeavor but some unethical ones lead to fraud. In which case, the unethical conflicts of interests are merely fraudulent and an instance of noncompliance, but not an ethical issue in the strictest sense.

3. We ran a pilot on PubMed and WoS with the same search terms and combinations. WoS retrieved a higher number of articles, and on that basis, we decided to use WoS.

4. For example, by using the term science, the algorithm would not search for scientific, but by using scien*, the algorithm will consider every word that starts with scien (e.g. science, scientific, scientifically, scientist, etc.).

5. Despite elaborate and multiple attempts to mobilized our network we were not able to retrieve these items.

6. Although specific discussions within each theme might have changed over time, it has not been the focus of this review to explore these changes from a quantitative perspective.

7. Attitudes toward some non-author contributions are changing. For more on this topic and an example, see the last subheading in the discussion section titled “Future research, from author to contributor”.

8. If available resources are selectively used to make one point of view look more supported/justified, or make desired conclusions, this issue can also be seen as a form of bias.

9. As one of the anonymous peer-reviewers highlighted, although it is common to think that a focus on quantity might negatively affect quality, taking a more nuanced view should be encouraged. For instance, it is argued that some prolific senior authors also end up producing the most note-worthy publications (Vincent and Costas 2016). Off course, noteworthiness and high impact are not synonymous with high quality, the point is that there obviously are prolific authors who produce high quality and/or high impact research.

10. We thank the anonymous reviewer for their suggestion to add more nuance here and providing some references that show a change of attitude toward crediting citizen scientists (see Resnik, Elliott, and Miller (2015) and Ward-Fear et al. (2020)).