Authors
Lauren A Maggio, Anthony R Artino Jr, Christopher J Watling, Erik W Driessen, Bridget C O’Brien
Publication date
2019/4/23
Journal
bioRxiv
Pages
615112
Publisher
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Description
Background
Authorship has major implications for a researcher’s promotion and tenure, future funding, and career opportunities. Due in part to these high-stakes consequences, many journals require authors to meet formal authorship criteria, e.g. the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for authorship. Yet on multiple surveys, researchers admit to violating these criteria, suggesting that authorship practices are a complex issue. Using qualitative methods, we aimed to unpack the complexities inherent in researchers’ conceptualizations of questionable authorship practices and to identify factors that make researchers vulnerable to engaging in such practices.
Methods and Findings
We conducted an interview study with a purposeful sample of 26 North American medical education researchers holding MD (n=17) and PhD (n=9) degrees and representing a range of career stages. We asked participants to respond to two vignettes – one portraying honorary authorship, the other describing an author order scenario – and then to describe related authorship experiences. Through thematic analysis, we found that participants, even when familiar with ICMJE criteria, conceptualized questionable authorship practices in various ways and articulated several ethical gray areas. We identified personal and situational factors, including hierarchy, resource dependence, institutional culture and gender, that contributed to participants’ vulnerability to and involvement in questionable authorship practices. Participants described negative instances of questionable authorship practices as well as situations in which these practices occurred …
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