Authorship and Contributorship in Scientific Publications

Abstract

Authorship in scientific publications is a credit conferred to those individuals who contribute to the work in a meaningful and substantive way. Authorship is a fruit of hard work of authors as it brings individual, organizational, scholarly and public incentives. Authorship is tied up with its ethical implications like responsibility and accountability. In this chapter we reviewed the latest authorship guidelines issued by various associations and organisations for an insight on criteria of authorship. Editorial policies of top 25 journals based on impact factor were explored for their authorship criteria, adoption of author contributor statements and persistent digital identifier. The criteria of authorship vary greatly across disciplines and so with the journals. Though, there are some common principles of authorship and their good practices. Critics of classical authorship support the contributorship model wherein contributions from individual authors are publicly declared allowing certain categories of contributors to be listed as authors. The transition from authorship to contributorship model at journals is ongoing. Further, the tremendous rise in multi-author and multi-discipline publications in science also support the adoption of the contributorship model. Different ways of deciding the sequence of authors in a scientific publication have been presented. Questionable authorship practices have raised issues which may sometimes go awry resulting in conflicts and disputes among authors. A section of this chapter delves into some popular cases of authorship misconducts. Suggestions for preventing and resolving authorship misconducts are also inscribed.