What are the key ethical issues related to authorship? Explain each one.
Answer:-
ethical issues related to authorship:
1. Academic authorship involves communicating scholarly work, establishing priority for discoveries, and building peer reputation.
2. Authorship comes with the acceptance of responsibility for the contents of the work and is a primary basis for evaluation in academic careers.
3. Ethical issues related to authorship include:
a. Including “guest” or “gift” authors who have little or no contribution to the work, which dilutes the credit of actual contributors and inflates the credentials of listed authors.
b. “Career-boost authorship” where coauthorship is bestowed on junior faculty or students to boost their employment or promotion prospects, despite lack of significant contribution.
c. “Career-preservation authorship” where administrators like department heads or deans are added as coauthors due to quid pro quo arrangements, benefiting from authorship without doing the required work.
d. “Ghost coauthorship” where actual contributors abstain from the author list due to undisclosed conflicts of interest within the organization.
e. Reciprocal coauthorship, where researchers list each other as coauthors without real collaboration, except for minimal reading and editing.
f. Misrepresenting contributions by acknowledging significant contributors instead of listing them as authors, denying them the ability to elaborate on the work.
4. All listed authors have the obligation to be aware of the content and consent to the submission of the research article.
5. Quantifying individual contributions to appropriately recognize and ascertain the degree of accountability of each coauthor is desirable.
6. Double submission, where a paper is submitted to two forums simultaneously, is an ethical issue related to authorship, as reputed journals want to publish original and unpublished work.
In summary, the key ethical concerns revolve around accurately representing authorship contributions, avoiding honorary or reciprocal authorship, ensuring transparency about conflicts of interest, and respecting the originality and exclusivity of publications.