Academic authorship
Academic authorship of journal articles, books, and other original works is a means by which academics communicate the results of their scholarly work, establish priority for their discoveries, and build their reputation among their peers. Through authorship, researchers, assistants, interns, students, and other involved parties receive credit for their contributions and can be held responsible and accountable for the quality and integrity of the work.
Authorship is a primary basis that employers use to evaluate academic personnel for employment, promotion, and tenure. In academic publishing, authorship of a work is typically claimed by those making intellectual contributions to the research described in the work. However, many scholarly journals also require that potential authors contribute to the writing of the article about the work, not just the work itself. Such requirements, as well as other norms around authorship in disciplines, can be controversial. In these contexts, authorship can encompass activities other than writing the article; a researcher who comes up with an experimental design and analyzes the data may be considered an author, even if she or he had little role in composing the text describing the results. According to some standards, even writing the entire article would not constitute authorship unless the writer was also involved in at least one other phase of the project.
Definition
Guidelines for assigning authorship vary between institutions and disciplines. They may be formally defined or simply cultural norms. Incorrect assignment of authorship occasionally leads to charges of academic misconduct and sanctions for the violator. A 2002 survey of a large sample of researchers who had received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health revealed that 10% of respondents claimed to have inappropriately assigned authorship credit within the last three years. This was the first large scale survey concerning such issues. In other fields only limited or no empirical data is available.Authorship in the natural sciences
The natural sciences have no universal standard for authorship, but some major multi-disciplinary journals and institutions have established guidelines for work that they publish. The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America has an editorial policy that specifies "authorship should be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work" and furthermore, "authors are strongly encouraged to indicate their specific contributions" as a footnote. The American Chemical Society further specifies that authors are those who also "share responsibility and accountability for the results" and the U.S. National Academies specify "an author who is willing to take credit for a paper must also bear responsibility for its contents. Thus, unless a footnote or the text of the paper explicitly assigns responsibility for different parts of the paper to different authors, the authors whose names appear on a paper must share responsibility for all of it."Authorship in mathematics
In mathematics, the authors are usually listed in alphabetical order.Authorship in medicine
The medical field defines authorship very narrowly. According to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, designation as an author must satisfy four conditions. The author must have:- Contributed substantially to the conception and design of the study, the acquisition of data, or the analysis and interpretation
- Drafted or provided critical revision of the article
- Provided final approval of the version to publish
- Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved
Authorship in the social sciences
The American Psychological Association has similar guidelines as medicine for authorship. The APA acknowledge that authorship is not limited to the writing of manuscripts, but must include those who have made substantial contributions to a study such as "formulating the problem or hypothesis, structuring the experimental design, organizing and conducting the statistical analysis, interpreting the results, or writing a major portion of the paper". While the APA guidelines list many other forms of contributions to a study that do not constitute authorship, it does state that combinations of these and other tasks may justify authorship. Like medicine, the APA considers institutional position, such as department chair, insufficient for attributing authorship.Authorship in the humanities
Neither the Modern Languages Association nor the Chicago Manual of Style define requirements for authorship.Growing number of authors per paper
From the late 17th century to the 1920s, sole authorship was the norm, and the one-paper-one-author model worked well for distributing credit. Today, shared authorship is common in most academic disciplines, with the exception of the humanities, where sole authorship is still the predominant model. Between about 1980-2010 the average number of authors in medical papers increased, and perhaps tripled. One survey found that in mathematics journals over the first decade of the 2000s, "the number of papers with 2, 3 and 4+ authors increased by approximately 50%, 100% and 200%, respectively, while single author papers decreased slightly."In particular types of research, including particle physics, genome sequencing and clinical trials, a paper's author list can run into the hundreds, referred to as "hyperauthorship". In 1998, the Collider Detector at Fermilab adopted a highly unorthodox policy for assigning authorship. CDF maintains a standard author list. All scientists and engineers working at CDF are added to the standard author list after one year of full-time work; names stay on the list until one year after the worker leaves CDF. Every publication coming out of CDF uses the entire standard author list, in alphabetical order. Other big collaborations, including most particle physics experiments, followed this model.
In large, multi-center clinical trials authorship is often used as a reward for recruiting patients. A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 reported on a clinical trial conducted in 1,081 hospitals in 15 different countries, involving a total of 41,021 patients. There were 972 authors listed in an appendix and authorship was assigned to a group. In 2015, an article in high-energy physics was published describing the measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson based on collisions in the Large Hadron Collider; the article boasted 5,154 authors, the printed author list needed 24 pages.
Large authors lists have attracted some criticism and are believed to negatively affect all existing ethical issues of authorship. They strain guidelines that insist that each author's role be described and that each author is responsible for the validity of the whole work. Such a system treats authorship more as credit for scientific service at the facility in general rather that as an identification of specific contributions. One commentator wrote, "In more than 25 years working as a scientific editor... I have not been aware of any valid argument for more than three authors per paper, although I recognize that this may not be true for every field." The rise of shared authorship has been attributed to Big Science—scientific experiments that require collaboration and specialization of many individuals.
Alternatively, the increase in multi-authorship is according to a game-theoretic analysis a consequence of the way scientists are evaluated. Scientists are judged by the number of papers they publish, and by the impact of those papers. Both measures are integrated into the most popular single value measure -index. The -index correlates with winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. When each author claims each paper and each citation as his/her own, papers and citations are multiplied by the number of authors. Since it is common and rational to cite own papers more than others, a high number of coauthors increases not only the number of own papers, but also their impact. As result, game rules set by -index being a decision criterion for success create a zero-sum -index ranking game, where the rational strategy includes maximizing the number of coauthors up to the majority of the researchers in a field. Data of 189 thousand publications showed that the coauthors' number is strongly correlated with -index. Hence, the system rewards heavily multi-authored papers. This problem is openly acknowledged, and it could easily be "corrected" by dividing each paper and its citations by the number of authors, though this practice has not been widely adopted.
Finally, the rise in shared authorship may also reflect increased acknowledgment of the contributions of lower level workers, including graduate students and technicians, as well as honorary authorship, while allowing for such collaborations to make an independent statement about the quality and integrity of a scientific work.
Order of authors in a list
Rules for the order of multiple authors in a list have historically varied significantly between fields of research. Some fields list authors in order of their degree of involvement in the work, with the most active contributors listed first; other fields, such as mathematics or engineering, sometimes list them alphabetically. Historically, biologists tended to place a principal investigator last in an author list whereas organic chemists might have put him or her first. Research articles in high energy physics, where the author lists can number in the tens to hundreds, often list authors alphabetically. In the academic fields of economics, business, finance or particle physics, it is also usual to sort the authors alphabetically.Although listing authors in order of the involvement in the project seems straightforward, it often leads to conflict. A study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that more than two-thirds of 919 corresponding authors disagreed with their coauthors regarding contributions of each author.