The vexing but persistent problem of authorship misconduct in research

Abstract

This paper examines authorship misconduct: practices such as gift, guest, honorary and ghost authorship (excluding plagiarism) that involve inappropriate attribution of authorship credits. Drawing on the existing literature, we describe the extent of authorship misconduct and why it presents a problem. We then construct a simple matching model of guest authorship to show how researchers can form teams (of two) where one researcher free-rides off the efforts of the other; at equilibrium, the latter is content for this free-riding to occur, rather than forming a different team involving no free-riding. We discuss how this model can be generalized to incorporate honorary and gift authorship, and why capturing ghost authorship may require significant changes to the modelling. While formal (game-theoretic) modelling of other aspects of research misconduct is prevalent in the literature, to our knowledge, ours is the first attempt to isolate the strategic interaction that leads to authorship misconduct. If authorship misconduct is a rational choice by researchers, we investigate the use of a monitoring-punishment approach to eliminate the free-riding equilibria. The possibility of monitoring is not just theoretical: we outline the recent advances in distributed ledger technology and authorship forensics that make monitoring of research workflows a viable strategy for institutions to curb authorship misconduct. One of the advantages of working with our simple model is that it provides a framework to examine the relationship between efficiency and ethics in this context, an issue that has by and large been ignored in the literature.