Questionable authorship practices across the disciplines: Building a multidisciplinary thesaurus using evolutionary concept analysis

Abstract

The culture surrounding authorship practices differs from discipline to discipline, with the potential for inconsistent terminology across disciplines to hamper comprehension in interdisciplinary conversations. To address this problem, an interdisciplinary corpus of research literature on the topic of questionable authorship practices was used to create a multidisciplinary thesaurus. This process used Evolutionary Concept Analysis (ECA) as mediated through MAXQDA. Problems of synonymy and polysemy are addressed using ECA which identifies and subsequently analyzes terms used to denote questionable authorship practices as well as their synonyms, relevant uses, attributes, references, antecedents, and consequences. The value is two-fold: first, this addresses the gap in the literature in terms of the identification, analysis, and organization of a set of interdisciplinary terms relating to questionable authorship practices; second, it presents a novel methodological approach to thesaurus construction from a multidisciplinary corpus through using ECA.