Inappropriate Journal Authorship

Abstract

In their article “Authorship Disputes in Scholarly Biomedical Publications and Trust in the Research Institution” in the July 2023 issue of RMMJ, Ashkenazi and Olsha examined the association between the prevalence of misattributed authorship and trust in the institution analyzing misconduct in their scholarly publications. The authors, appropriately, include “gift authorship” as one of the three principal deviations from appropriate authorship choices that they examined. In essence, gift or honorary authorship is listing an author on a scholarly publication for which that person’s contribution did not justify assigning authorship. This behavior has become commonplace.

The Centrality of Trust in Academic Publishing Lies with the Corresponding Author

“…I have followed, with great interest, the passionate debate held between Lichtman, 1 and Ashkenazi and Olsha 2 in Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal . Lichtman put forward a curious and enlightening proposal to offer a fractional value to each author, depending on the value of their relative contribution, with the total amounting to 1, as a way to reduce authorship abuses, such as gift or guest authorship, which are two very prevalent forms of authorship abuses in academic publishing today.…”

Inappropriate Journal Authorship, Disputes, Plagiarism, and Mistrust in the Institution: Different Beasts ... Same Problem

“…We would like to thank Professor Marshall Lichtman for his letter, his interesting proposal, and using this venue to promote discussion of the topic. Professor Lichtman proposed a numerical calculation for authorship based on the authors’ perceptions of their relative contribution to a scientific publication, 1 an idea also suggested by Jozsef Kovacs. 2 The only limitation imposed by this system is that the total of all authors’ fractional contributions to any one publication equals no more than one.…”