Issues related to Authorship, Co-Authorship, and Collaboration

General Information about Authorship, Co-authorship, and Collaboration

Authorship disputes make up for 2% to 11% of all disagreements in the scientific community. Many of these disputes arise when there are multiple authors or when clear lines of responsibility are not drawn at the beginning of a project. Of course, many professional and intellectual societies have set guidelines to aid in authorship conflicts. For example, according to Desai, in order to be considered an author, one must have substantial contributions to the conception, design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, one must have helped draft the article or assisted in the critical revision for important intellectual content, or one must have had the final approval of the version of the article that was going to be published (2012). To learn more about issues regarding authorship, co-authorship, and collaboration, please see the sources we have provided below.

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Authorship from the reader’s side (1982). Annals of Internal Medicine, 97(4), 613-614.

Ayiomamitis, A. (1987). Multiple authorship: a mathematical sanctuary. CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal, 137(12), 1077.

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Bennett, D. M., & Taylor, D. M. (2003). Unethical practices in authorship of scientific papers. Emergency Medicine, 15(3), 263-270.

Burman, K. D. (1982). Hanging from the masthead: reflections on authorship. Annals of Internal Medicine, 97(4), 602-605.

Coauthorship and publication credit. In APA Publication manual (5th ed.) (350-351). Washington, D.C.: The American Psychological Association.

Clement, T. P. (2014). Authorship matrix: A rational approach to quantify individual contributions and responsibilities in multi-author scientific articles. Science and Engineering Ethics, 20(2), 345-361.

Costa, M. M., & Gatz, M. (1992). Determination of authorship credit in published dissertations. Psychological Science, 3(6), 354-357.

Cronin, B., Shaw, D., & La Barre, K. (2003). A cast of thousands: Coauthorship and subauthorship collaboration in the 20th century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy.Journal of the American Society for information Science and Technology, 54(9), 855-871.

Cronin, B. (2001). Hyperauthorship: A postmodern perversion or evidence of a structural shift in scholarly communication practices? Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 52(7), 558-569.

Dance, A. (2012). Authorship: Who’s on first?. Nature, 489(7417), 591-593.

Day, R. A. (1993). Ethical issues yesterday and today: three cases spread over nearly half a century demonstrate how persistently questions of ethics arise and illuminate the principles underlying them. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 24(4), 258.

Desai, C. (2012). Authorship Issues. Indian Journal of Pharmacology, 44(4): 433–434.

Digiusto, E. (1994). Equity in authorship: A strategy for assigning credit when publishing. Social Science & Medicine, 38(1), 55-58.

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Endersby, J. W. (1996). Collaborative research in the social sciences: Multiple authorship and publication credit.Social Science Quarterly, 375-392.

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Fine, M. A., & Kurdek, L. A. (1993). Reflections on determining authorship credit and authorship order on faculty-student collaborations. American Psychologist, 48(11), 1141.

Fotion, N., & Conrad, C. C. (1984). Authorship and other credits. Annals of internal medicine, 100(4), 592-594.

Friesinger, G.C. (1986). Who should be an author? Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 8(5), 1240-1242.

Fye, W. B. (1990). Medical authorship: traditions, trends, and tribulations. Annals of internal medicine, 113(4), 317-325.

Gaeta, T. J. (1999). Authorship:“law” and order. Academic Emergency Medicine, 6(4), 297-301.

Gelman, S. R., & Gibelman, M. (1999). A quest for citations? An analysis of and commentary on the trend toward multiple authorship. Journal of Social Work Education, 35(2), 203-213.

George, A. (2012). Constructing intellectual property. Cambridge University Press.

Hart, R. L. (2000). Co-authorship in the academic library literature: a survey of attitudes and behaviors. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 26(5), 339-345.

Huth, E. J. (1986). Guidelines on authorship of medical papers. Annals of Internal Medicine, 104(2), 269-274.

Huth, E. J. (1986). Irresponsible authorship and wasteful publication. Annals of Internal Medicine, 104(2), 257-259.

Hwang, S. S., Song, H. H., Baik, J. H., Jung, S. L., Park, S. H., Choi, K. H., & Park, Y. H. (2003). Researcher contributions and fulfillment of ICMJE authorship criteria: Analysis of author contribution lists in research articles with multiple authors published in radiology 1. Radiology, 226(1), 16-23.

Khanam, S. (2013). Deciding the order of authors on a paper. Editage Insights.

Laband, D. N. (2002). Contribution, attribution and the allocation of intellectual property rights: economics versus agricultural economics. Labour economics, 9(1), 125-131.

Lake, D. A. (2010). Who’s on First? Listing authors by relative contribution trumps the alphabet. PS: Political Science & Politics, 43(01), 43-47.

Marušić, M., Božikov, J., Katavić, V., Hren, D., Kljaković-Gašpić, M., & Marušić, A. (2004). Authorship in a small medical journal: a study of contributorship statements by corresponding authors. Science and engineering ethics, 10(3), 493-502.

Miller, N. K. (1986). Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader. In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (pp. 102-120). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Morgan, P. P. (1984). How many authors can dance on the head of an article? Canadian Medical Association journal, 130(7), 842.

Moulopoulos, S. D., Sideris, D. A., & Georgilis, K. A. (1983). For debate… Individual contributions to multiauthor papers. Br Med J (Clin Res Ed), 287(6405), 1608-1610.

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Netting, F. E., & Nichols-Casebolt, A. (1997). Authorship and collaboration: Preparing the next generation of social work scholars. Journal of Social Work Education, 33(3), 555-564.

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Rennie, D., & Flanagin, A. (1994). Authorship! authorship!: Guests, ghosts, grafters, and the two-sided coin. Jama, 271(6), 469-471.

Relman, A. S. (1984). Responsibilities of authorship: where does the buck stop? The New England journal of medicine, 310(16), 1048.

Rennie, D., Flanagin, A., & Yank, V. (2000). The contributions of authors. Jama, 284(1), 89-91.

Rennie, D., Yank, V., & Emanuel, L. (1997). When authorship fails: a proposal to make contributors accountable. Jama, 278(7), 579-585.

Riesenberg, D., & Lundberg, G. D. (1990). The order of authorship: who’s on first?. JAMA, 264(14), 1857-1857.

Schmidt, R. (1987). A Worksheet for Authorship of Scientific Articles. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 68(1), 8-10.

Shapiro, D. W., Wenger, N. S., & Shapiro, M. F. (1994). The contributions of authors to multiauthored biomedical research papers. JaMa, 271(6), 438-442.

Shawchuck, C. R., Fatis, M., & Breitenstein, J. L. (1986). A practical guide to the assignment of authorship credit. The Behavior Therapist.

Sheikh, A. (2000). Publication ethics and the research assessment exercise: reflections on the troubled question of authorship. Journal of Medical Ethics, 26(6), 422-426.

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Tscharntke, T., Hochberg, M. E., Rand, T. A., Resh, V. H., & Krauss, J. (2007). Author sequence and credit for contributions in multiauthored publications. PLoS Biol, 5

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Wilcox, L. J. (1998). Authorship: the coin of the realm, the source of complaints. Jama, 280(3), 216-217.

Winkler, J. (2014). The challenge of giving credit where credit is due: “who’s on first?”. American Association of Geographers.

Winston, R. B. (1985). A suggested procedure for determining order of authorship in research publications. Journal of Counseling & Development, 63(8), 515-518.

Yankauer, A. (1987). Editor’s Report—On Decisions and Authorships. American Journal of Public Health, 77(3), 271.

Zook, I. I. (1987). Trend toward multiple authorship: Update and extension. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 34(1), 77.

Zuckerman, H. A. (1968). Patterns of name ordering among authors of scientific papers: A study of social symbolism and its ambiguity. American Journal of Sociology, 74(3), 276-291.