University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
KU Leuven, Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2019 May 2;14(5):e0215962. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0215962. eCollection 2019.
Increasing complexity and multidisciplinarity make collaboration essential for modern science. This, however, raises the question of how to assign accountability for scientific misconduct among larger teams of authors. Biomedical societies and science associations have put forward various sets of guidelines. Some state that all authors are jointly accountable for the integrity of the work. Others stipulate that authors are only accountable for their own contribution. Alternatively, there are guarantor type models that assign accountability to a single author. We contribute to this debate by analyzing the outcomes of 80 scientific misconduct investigations of biomedical scholars conducted by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). We show that the position of authors on the byline of 184 publications involved in misconduct cases correlates with responsibility for the misconduct. Based on a series of binary regression models, we show that first authors are 38% more likely to be responsible for scientific misconduct than authors listed in the middle of the byline (p<0.01). Corresponding authors are 14% more likely (p<0.05). These findings suggest that a guarantor-like model where first authors are ex-ante accountable for misconduct is highly likely to not miss catching the author responsible, while not afflicting too many bystanders.
日益复杂和跨学科的性质使得合作对于现代科学至关重要。然而，这就提出了一个问题，即在更大的作者团队中，如何分配科学不端行为的责任。生物医学学会和科学协会已经提出了各种准则。有些准则规定，所有作者都共同对工作的完整性负责。其他准则则规定，作者只对自己的贡献负责。或者，还有一种保证人类型的模型，将责任分配给单一作者。我们通过分析美国研究诚信办公室（ORI）进行的 80 项生物医学学者科学不端行为调查的结果，对这一争论做出了贡献。我们表明，在涉及不端行为的 184 篇出版物的作者署名位置与不端行为的责任相关。基于一系列二元回归模型，我们表明，第一作者比署名中间的作者更有可能对科学不端行为负责（p<0.01）。通讯作者更有可能（p<0.05）。这些发现表明，一种类似于保证人的模型，即第一作者对不端行为负有预先责任，很可能不会错过追究责任的作者，同时也不会牵连太多旁观者。
