Abstract
Authorship is the currency of an academic career for which the number of papers researchers publish demonstrates creativity, productivity, and impact. To discourage coercive authorship practices and inflated publication records, journals require authors to affirm and detail their intellectual contributions but this strategy has been unsuccessful as authorship lists continue to grow. Here, we surveyed close to 6000 of the top cited authors in all science categories with a list of 25 research activities that we adapted from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) authorship guidelines. Responses varied widely from individuals in the same discipline, same level of experience, and same geographic region. Most researchers agreed with the NIH criteria and grant authorship to individuals who draft the manuscript, analyze and interpret data, and propose ideas. However, thousands of the researchers also value supervision and contributing comments to the manuscript, whereas the NIH recommends discounting these activities when attributing authorship. People value the minutiae of research beyond writing and data reduction: researchers in the humanities value it less than those in pure and applied sciences; individuals from Far East Asia and Middle East and Northern Africa value these activities more than anglophones and northern Europeans. While developing national and international collaborations, researchers must recognize differences in peoples values while assigning authorship.
Highlights
The scientific process requires ingenuity and individuals that contribute creativity to answering the research question merit authorship [1, 2]
National Institutes of Health (NIH) list was specific to health and excluded activities often relegated to acknowledgments: peer interactive communications—advice, discussion, critical comment, and inspiration—[26], and access to experimental data, specimens, technical or statistical help, editorial assistance, data gathering/data entry, and financial or moral support [27]
Patience Polytechnique Montréal Telephone number Ethics statement In a follow up email, we summarized the country of origins of 3000 participants and shared the bibliometric data for the category in which Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) indexed their paper
Summary
The scientific process requires ingenuity and individuals that contribute creativity to answering the research question merit authorship [1, 2]. In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work they have done, authors should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for other parts of the work. They stipulate that any individual that contributed to the first activity be given the opportunity to participate in activities 2, 3, and 4, so as not to exclude them from authorship. It is dishonest to include authors only because of their reputation, position of authority, or friendship (guest authorship)
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