Faculty of Dentistry, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Department of Food Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.
Account Res. 2021 Nov;28(8):492-516. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2020.1860764. Epub 2020 Dec 24.
Despite the widely used author contribution criteria, unethical authorship practices such as guest, ghost, and honorary authorship remain largely unsolved. We have identified six major reasons by analyzing 78 published papers addressing unethical authorship practice. Those are lack of: (i) awareness about and (ii) compliance with authorship criteria, (iii) universal definition and scope for determining authorship, (iv) common mechanisms for positioning an author in the list, (v) quantitative measures of intellectual contribution; and (vi) pressure to publish. As a measure to control unethical practice, we have evaluated the possibility to adopt an author categorization scheme - proposed according to the common understanding of how first-, co-, principal-, or corresponding- author is perceived. Based on an online opinion survey, the scheme was supported by ~80% of the respondents (n=370). The impact of the proposed categorization was then evaluated using a novel mathematical tool to measure "Author Performance Index (API)" that can be higher for those who might have authored more papers as primary and/or principal authors than those as coauthors. Hence, if adopted, the proposed author categorization scheme together with the API would provide a better way to evaluate the credit of an individual as a primary and principal author.
尽管广泛使用了作者贡献标准，但诸如客座、幽灵和荣誉作者等不道德的作者行为仍然在很大程度上没有得到解决。我们通过分析 78 篇关于不道德作者行为的已发表论文，确定了六个主要原因。这些原因包括：（i）缺乏对作者标准的认识和（ii）遵守，（iii）确定作者身份的普遍定义和范围，（iv）在列表中定位作者的共同机制，（v）衡量智力贡献的定量措施；以及（vi）出版压力。作为控制不道德行为的一项措施，我们评估了采用作者分类方案的可能性-该方案是根据对第一作者、共同作者、主要作者或相应作者的理解提出的。根据在线意见调查，约 80%的受访者（n=370）支持该方案。然后，使用一种新的数学工具来评估所提出的分类方案的影响，该工具可以通过测量“作者绩效指数（API）”来评估，对于那些作为主要作者和/或主要作者撰写的论文比作为共同作者撰写的论文更多的人，API 会更高。因此，如果采用，所提出的作者分类方案和 API 将提供一种更好的方法来评估个人作为主要作者和主要作者的信用。
