The Abuse of Authorship in the Biomedical Literature

Central Asian Journal of Medical Hypotheses and Ethics 4 (2):123-126 (2023)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The ‘publish or perish’ culture has induced an unhealthy aspect of academic publishing in the biomedical sciences, namely of illegitimate authorship. Such a position can be obtained when an authorship slot is offered as a gift (e.g., to a sponsor, or researcher in a senior position), without their intellectual or scientific participation, or it can be hidden (ghost authorship), in which the paper (or parts thereof) is written by a third party (individual, or company). In a more industrialized setting, ghost authorship takes place via the sale of papers using “paper mills”, including of specific author slots (i.e., positions in a line of authors). While author-based persistent identifiers like ORCID, or authorship attribution schemes like CRediT, sound noble and offer some form of validation, those systems still operate on a culture of blind trust (in submitting authors). This paper debates a few of the authorship-related issues currently plaguing biomedical journals.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,401

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Unethical Authorship Deals: Concepts, Challenges and Guidelines.Keshnee Padayachee - 2019 - In Nico Nortjé, Retha Visagie & J. S. Wessels, Social Science Research Ethics in Africa. Springer Verlag. pp. 103-115.
Proliferation of authors on research reports in medicine.Joost P. H. Drenth - 1996 - Science and Engineering Ethics 2 (4):469-480.

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-08-26

Downloads
22 (#1,015,764)

6 months
5 (#702,808)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references