“The person in power told me to”—European PhD students’ perspectives on guest authorship and good authorship practice

Abstract

Questionable authorship practices in scientific publishing are detrimental to research quality and management. The existing literature dealing with the prevalence, and perceptions, of such practices has focused on the medical sciences, and on experienced researchers. In contrast, this study investigated how younger researchers (PhD students) from across the faculties view fair authorship attribution, their experience with granting guest authorships to more powerful researchers and their reasons for doing so. Data for the study were collected in a survey of European PhD students. The final dataset included 1,336 participants from five European countries (Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Switzerland) representing all major disciplines. Approximately three in ten reported that they had granted at least one guest authorship to “a person in power”. Half of these indicated that they had done so because they had been told to do so by the person in power. Participants from the medical, natural and technical sciences were much more likely to state that they had granted a guest authorship than those from other faculties. We identified four general views about what is sufficient for co-authorship. There were two dominant views. The first (inclusive view) considered a broad range of contributions to merit co-authorship. The second (strongly writing-oriented) emphasised that co-authors must have written a piece of the manuscript text. The inclusive view dominated in the natural, technical, and medical sciences. Participants from other faculties were more evenly distributed between the inclusive and writing oriented view. Those with an inclusive view were most likely to indicate that they have granted a guest authorship. According to the experiences of our participants, questionable authorship practices are prevalent among early-career researchers, and they appear to be reinforced through a combination of coercive power relations and dominant norms in some research cultures, particularly in the natural, technical, and medical sciences.

Inappropriate Journal Authorship

“…This behavior has become commonplace. 2,3 For a time, I collected two types of articles displaying exaggerated authorship: (1) papers in which the number of authors exceeded the number of patients studied, usually in a small clinical trial; and (2) reports of single cases in which the authorship consisted of ten or more authors. 4 The ingenuity and creativity of justifying authorship in the cases in which the journal required such an explanation impressed me.…”

“…There is, also, sometimes, the (unethical) requirement (pressure) to include a senior person who was not a meaningful contributor. 3 Kovacs has provided the most in-depth discussion of the pros and cons of the proposal to have the citation credit of all authors on a paper sum to one paper.…”

“…There is, also, sometimes, the (unethical) requirement (pressure) to include a senior person who was not a meaningful contributor. 3 …”

[Book Review]: The Pernicious PhD Supervisor by Tara Brabazon

“…Many of us, including Brabazon (who has occupied research leadership roles for decades), continue to witness the abuse of PhD students. With such uneven power dynamics between supervisors and their students (Goddiksen et al 2023), the darker side of SoS has remained silent. In her audiobook, Brabazon shared her witnessed accounts of pernicious supervision, her expertise in higher education studies, and the sonic medium to rend this silence.…”