Abstract
Authorship problems are deep-rooted in the field of science communication. Some of these relate to lack of specific journal instructions. For decades, experts in journal editing and publishing have been exploring the authorship criteria and contributions deserving either co-authorship or acknowledgment. The issue of inconsistencies of listing and abbreviating author names has come to the fore lately. There are reports on the difficulties of figuring out Chinese surnames and given names of South Indians in scholarly articles. However, it seems that problems with correct listing and abbreviating author names are global. This article presents an example of swapping second (father’s) name with surname in a ‘predatory’ journal, where numerous instances of incorrectly identifying and crediting authors passed unnoticed for the journal editors, and no correction has been published. Possible solutions are discussed in relation to identifying author profiles and adjusting editorial policies to the emerging problems. Correcting mistakes with author names post-publication and integrating with the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) platform are among them.
Highlights
Authorship problems are not new to the publishing industry, and probably existed in the classical writings long before the launch of the first scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665)
The centuries-long uncertainties over his identity and debates over the authorship of his poems, claimed by some to be ghost-written by noble people with exquisite language close to the royal court, continue well into the 21st century [1,2]
Recommendations are offered to all those engaged in science communication to raise awareness of what constitutes ethical authorship [4]
Summary
Authorship problems are not new to the publishing industry, and probably existed in the classical writings long before the launch of the first scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665). The scale of the problem is reflected in the exponential increase of scholarly items tagged with the term “authorship” in PubMed with the first record appearing in 1895 and reaching a peak level of 372 articles in 2014 (as of March 20, 2016). ©Copyright by Croatian Society of Medical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine.
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