Authorship ethics: an overview of research on the state of practice
This overview addresses authorship ethics problems for researchers and ethics committees, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing studies without new empirical findings.
The paper reviews 16 empirical studies from 2014-2020 to examine how different research disciplines handle authorship practices and associated issues, such as varying guidelines and decision-making challenges.
Authorship ethics is a central topic of discussion in research ethics fora. There are various guidelines for authorship (i.e., naming and order). It is not easy to decide the authorship in the presence of varying authorship guidelines. This paper gives an overview of research on authorship practices and issues. It presents a review of 16 empirical research papers published between 2014 -- 2020. The objective is to learn how various research disciplines handle authorship. What are the authorship practices in various research disciplines, and what are the issues associated with these practices?