Co-authorship in the context of academic integrity

Abstract

To find out how Ukrainian scholars view co-authorship, a Google form was posted on Facebook in professional communities. The survey was filled out by 198 scholars representing 24 fields. Among the main reasons for co-authorship, respondents identified the following: possibility of intellectual development, establishment of professional contacts, opportunity to save time, material rewards as a result of such publication, pressure of a manager who wants to have a publication but does not actually participate in the research, access to expensive equipment and materials, ability to share costs with all co-authors, bad English language skills, increased likelihood of being published with co-author authority, and more. We managed to get numerous answers illustrating the difficulties of preparing scientific publications in co-authorship: delays by other authors, reluctance of collaborators to take into account the comments of reviewers, the low requirements of some collaborators to itself, when they allow themselves to be published in “predatory journals”, problems during interpersonal communication, the need to include in the list of authors the people who did not participate in the writing of the article, long-term text alignment by co-authors, plagiarism, language problems, conflicting views on the results. Ethical problems arising from the co-authorship are revealed: the order of authors, distribution of scientific contribution, authorship of the administrative director, authorship of works performed under scientific supervision, etc.The article also addresses the problem of gift and guest authorship and elucidates the attitude of Ukrainian scientists to the services of companies that “guarantee” the publication of articles in international peer-reviewed journals.

Authorship Conflicts in Academia: an International Cross-Discipline Survey

“…Specifically, the inherent competition for jobs, promotions, grants, and recognition amongst researchers is often associated with self-interested behavior which may lead to conflicts over these two authorship credit distribution questions (authorship credit conflicts, for short) [11,12,13,14]. Naturally, as the number of parties involved in collaborative research work increases, the magnitude and intensity of these conflicts increase proportionally [15,16,17].…”