Authorship in science: A critical analysis from a Foucauldian perspective

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the discussion on authorship in contemporary science from Foucauldian and Kuhnian perspectives, highlighting the social aspects of science and the role of authorship in scientific revolutions. Thus, it describes the functions of the 'author' discussed by Foucault that can assist to reveal the characteristics of the scientific practice and examples of how theories are materialized. As a result, it identifies the ways in which modern science is developed and how knowledge is construed by multiple authors, group authors, the merit that is attributed by citations, etc. This article highlights the complexity of authorship attribution and the need to rethink generalized bibliometric techniques to evaluate science considering other aspects that go beyond the mere listing of the authors.

Concept theory in library and information science: an epistemological analysis

“…So the thesis is aetiologically positivist.” Bird’s aetiological solution was also linked to the problem of ascribing one author to a position historically, i.e., within the causal relationship of History and the construction of discourse. While some of the problems of identifying the discourse and epistemological stance of an author as a whole, considering different moments, was discussed by Hilário et al (2018), we agree that it is important to focus on what methods the author uses or advocates for classification over how they classify or consider themselves (as done in the aforementioned studies by Beak and Martínez-Ávila).…”