research paper ghost authors

What Is Ghost, Guest, and Gift Authorship in Research?

Authorship defines the role of a creator, whose intention is to circulate original ideas and intellectual works. In scholarly publishing, in particular, the role of the author carries significant responsibility, legal rights, and privileges. The career of academics is often based on the authorship of the papers published by them, however, driven by the pressure to “publish or perish”(Editorial 2010). Based on the final dissemination of works created, we discuss the differences among the ghost, guest and gift authorship in academia.

The ghost-writer is a professional writer, whose contribution to produce a paper will be excluded in the final publication. These writers often work for medical communication agencies commissioned by pharmaceutical companies and ensure timely publication of large clinical trials. These named authors may have conducted the research as scientists/clinicians to produce the data, but have not written the article themselves. Ghost authorship is common to journals reporting large-scale clinical trials, regulatory documentation, and literature summaries for healthcare professionals. In this situation , however, it is particularly rewarding when a qualified writer has a direct impact on improving medical literacy.

The National Association of Science Writers and the American Medical Writers Association thereby update guidance to medical writers regularly. The European Medical Writers Association has similarly developed guidelines for ghost authorship in peer-reviewed publications (Jacobs and Wager 2005). These guidelines require the lead author to generate the content and to acknowledge the involvement of professional writers. While opinions on ghost authorship vary; the approach of introducing transparency by acknowledging professional writers alongside the funding statement (Wislar et al. 2011) can be helpful.

The Guest and the Gift

According to the guidelines by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), guest authors indirectly affiliate to a study article. However, it is common in academia.  Often, researchers use guest authorship in lieu of acquiring grants, funds or providing supervision. Lead authors often face conflicting pressure to include their supervisor in a publication, despite the lack of direct contribution. While “passive academic contributions” may deserve this at some institutions, for journals, it is the exception, not the rule (Bavdekar 2012). Conventionally, guest authorship is an unethical concept, thus most journal editors have a clear policy to prevent this situation.

For instance, many journals require authors to clarify their individual contribution in the final article. Consequently, presenting authorship to individuals who have not done the actual work – as ‘gifts’ may become obsolete in journals due to these author guidelines .

The committee on publication ethics (COPE) and the council of scientific editors have updated academic authorship guidelines over the years. As discussed, authorship issues do exist in the scholarly publishing. To limit such conflict, editors expect researchers to:

• Identify the co-authors and contributors of a study, prior to its publication.
• Subsequently, read the guidelines in medical journals that clearly articulate individuals who qualify for being an author/co-author or acknowledgment for verification.
• Finally, identify the individual contributions made to establish accountability for the reported works.

In publication ethics, authorship prompts thought-provoking discussions . In addition to editorial guidelines, academic organizations in different fields have their own criteria to define and consider suitability for authorship. For example, in biomedicine, the authorship is defined according to the ICMJE guidelines . However, N.I.H’s (National Institute of Health) definition slightly varies from this concept (Resnik et al. 2016). COPE, on the other hand, admits absence of a universally agreed definition.

Have you ever faced any issues related to authorship when working with your team or making submissions to a journal? Leave us a comment to share your thoughts on these ethical considerations.

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The gift of paper authorship

Researchers seek clearer rules on crediting co-authors.

Dalmeet Singh Chawla

Credit: Praneat/Getty

31 July 2020

Praneat/Getty

An email from a student requesting money in exchange for co-authorship on a new paper set off alarm bells for Sridhar Vedachalam, director of water at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in Washington, DC.

Vedachalam asked the student what they needed the money for. He never heard back, but advised the student not to make such approaches to other researchers.

‘Gift’ authorship, where researchers are added as co-authors without contributing much or any work to the paper, is the most common type of research fraud in the United States, according to a new study published in the journal Accountability in Research .

The study, led by Michael Reisig, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University, surveyed 613 researchers from 100 leading research-intensive universities in the US. Data fabrication was the least common type of research fraud, the survey found.

The many faces of gift authorship

Some researchers think that adding famous scholars to the author list of their manuscript – with or without their knowledge – will increase their chances of being published or winning a grant funding application.

There’s also ‘honorary authorship’, where senior researchers are named as authors because of their stature within the institution where the research took place, or because they helped to obtain the funding . Honorary authorship is usually given with the knowledge and approval of the recipient.

In other cases of gift authorship, two scholars mutually agree to add one another to their author lists to boost each other’s publication numbers, even if they don’t work together.

Another example is when researchers feel they ‘owe’ authorship to a current or previous colleague in return for their help or mentorship.

In his case, Vedachalam isn’t sure that the student who approached him was aware that what they were doing was unethical. Graduate students, particularly those from low- and middle-income countries , often do not receive adequate training on the ethics of publishing and authorship practices.

Authorship in return for opportunities

An environmental sciences researcher based in Sweden, who wished to remain anonymous to protect their professional network, told Nature Index that they were offered the prospect of working with a professor based in Europe after completing their PhD if they agreed to add the professor as a gift author on a manuscript.

The researcher says the senior academic was being reassessed for extension of their tenure and did not have the requisite number of publications.

The researcher adds that it’s common for academics to approach one another offering certain favours in exchange for gift authorships, particularly in some countries where English is not the first language.

“Often those who are younger seem to be seen as labour to be used or exploited,” the researcher says.

Basant Giri, a senior scientist at the Kathmandu Institute of Applied Sciences in Nepal, says he has heard of stories of gift authorship, as well as its parallel opposite, ghost authorship — where real authors are excluded from author lists.

In 2019, an international survey of almost 500 researchers led by Gary McDowell, executive director of Future of Research, an advocacy group representing junior researchers in Boston, Massachusetts, found that nearly half had ghostwritten peer-review reports early in their careers at the request of senior faculty.

“Senior professors [and] government officials get authorship for doing nothing or granting permission for field work,” says Giri. “We need to create a mechanism so that people can report such issues. The mechanism also must ensure punishment/correction systems are in place.”

Dealing with gift and ghost authorship

To combat the problem of gift and ghost authorship, Reisig says it’s important to prepare graduate students for the potentially awkward conversations they might have with their supervisor when it comes to deciding on author list hierarchies.

Establishing standardized criteria for such hierarchies would help young researchers navigate this more effectively. Some academics have developed their own systems of assigning authorship credit and creating author lists , such as point-based systems.

Some journals and publishers have started asking researchers to explain the roles they played in studies. This information is sometimes published with the manuscripts, to draw a distinction between authorship to contributorship.

Eric Fong, who studies research management at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says ghost and guest authorships often stem from the fact that researchers differ in their opinions on what constitutes authorship.

Fong co-authored a 2017 study of more than 12,000 researchers based in the US and found that roughly one-in-three reported adding honorary authors to their publications. Women and junior faculty were the most likely to do so.

A recent paper by Fong makes the case that including false investigators on grant proposals — another common form of gift authorship — to federal funding agencies in the US is illegal under the False Statements Act.

He says there needs to be global consensus on how much involvement is required to meet co-authorship standards.

“A clear delineation over what authorship is would help,” says Fong. But as long as there are incentives to publish as many papers as possible, he adds, “you will have people who will cheat”.

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Ghost, Guest, and Gift Authorship

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Co-authorship ; Ghostwriting ; Gratuitous author ; Honorary author ; Unacknowledged authorship ; Unearned authorship

The COPE discussion document on authorship states, “At a minimum, authors should guarantee that they have done the work as presented and that they have not violated any other author’s legal rights (e.g., copyright) in the process” (COPE Council 2014 ). Ghost, guest, and gift authorships violate that basic tenet. Ghost authors are individuals who have actually made substantial contributions to the writing of a manuscript, but they are not listed as an author. Professional writers hired to write an article for another individual or group but are not listed as authors or contributors are called ghost authors. People who write essays for hire for student purchase are also ghost writers. Guest authors are added to papers, with or without their knowledge, by another author in an attempt to attach greater prestige or importance to the work or to flatter a senior...

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AMWA–EMWA–ISMPP Joint position statement on the role of professional medical writers (2017) https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.amwa.org/resource/resmgr/about_amwa/JointPositionStatement.Profe.pdf . Accessed 10 Oct 2018

COPE Council (2014) What constitutes authorship? COPE discussion document. https://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/Authorship_DiscussionDocument_0_0.pdf . Accessed 09 Oct 2018

International Council of Medical Journal Editors (2018) Defining the role of authors and contributors. http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html . Accessed 09 Oct 2018

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Pierson, C.A. (2019). Ghost, Guest, and Gift Authorship. In: Poff, D., Michalos, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_313-1

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Ghostwriting in academic journals: How can we mitigate its impact on research integrity?

Research integrity

Well-intentioned open access journals that engage in best practices have been a boon to the research community. But the flipside is that the burgeoning field of open access journals has given rise to fake journals, also known as predatory, deceptive, fraudulent, clone, or pseudo-journals (Beall, Nature 2012). These journals are ones that do not engage in peer review and have minimal or little copy edits. In other words, they exist primarily to extract publication fees from authors.

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Contract cheating –engaging a third party like an essay mill or even a friend or family member to submit work as one’s own–is an unquestionable form of academic misconduct. We’ve established that engaging in contract cheating hampers learning. To that end, there are now laws and activism against contract cheating in various regions around the world.

In academic research, other terms synonymous with contract cheating are more widely used; these words are ghostwriting or ghost authorship .

Ghostwriting is a term used to describe academic research written by someone whose name is not acknowledged. The third party may be anyone who engages in this behavior, including individuals hired by private companies in the industry that may provide undisclosed influence on research.

Ghostwriting may entail taking credit for an entire article written by a third party, crediting “honorary” authors for work they did not do, or not crediting junior researchers for their participation. When authors are named without having participated in research or writing, they are called “honorary” authors or “guest” authors and this related form of behavior also qualifies as misconduct.

The most egregious forms of ghostwriting are articles completely written by an industry representative about research in which the stated authors have taken no part, or articles written by industry that provide selective research outcomes to promote products of which the researchers and acknowledged authors are unaware.

In the world of medical writing, the misconduct of ghostwriting is particularly pervasive, as pharmaceutical companies often collaborate with researchers to promote products and support regulatory requests; in fact, the term for legitimately doing so is called publication planning and strategy . But when these contributions aren’t acknowledged, research slides into misconduct. Researchers state that “We believe that critics are right to condemn the production of ghostwritten journal articles, a practice we believe to be unethical and dangerous” and while collaboration itself is not the problem, “the problem is the specific ways in which these collaborations are disguised, manipulated, and used as tools for marketing drugs” ( Moffatt & Elliott, 2007 ).

Studies have shown that ghostwriting and guest authorship are prevalent within research. A study published in Nature stated that 10.0% of participating scientists engaged in “inappropriately assigning authorship credit”; mid-career scientists’ numbers are even more troubling, with a 12.3% admission rate ( Martinson, Anderson, and de Vries, 2005 ). A more recent 2011 study found that “the prevalence of articles with honorary and ghost authors across three peer-reviewed journals was 14.3% and 0.9%, respectively” ( Dotson & Slaughter, 2011 ). And a 2002 study of Cochrane reviews revealed that an astounding 39% of articles had “honorary” authorship and 9% had “ghost authors” ( Mowatt, et al., 2002 ).

The above numbers may vary, but establish that ghostwriting is happening due to myriad pressure points.

Ghostwriting can be perceived as a way to increase economic opportunities. For medical writers employed by industry, it is a career opportunity. For academic researchers, collaboration with industry may be correlated to prestige and grant support. And “for industry sponsors, these practices are part of global publication strategies for product promotion,” by developing relationships with academics ( Bosch & Ross, 2012 ).

The nature of research, too, can lead to ambiguity. Collaboration is a core component of good citizenship within academia. Funding, too, is more often than not tied to related industries. But these working relationships can often blur boundaries.

Propagating a perception of collaboration has encouraged the practice of multiple authors on research articles. By adding co-authors to a paper, particularly names of more established academics, researchers provide more esteem to their work and increase their chances of being published in more prestigious journals and gaining a wider audience. In fact, “Part of the problem is that good names give papers credibility. A colleague once told me that in his country it was more important to know the authors than the methods of a research paper, as some professors lent their names to almost anything if they were well paid. I have seen single-authored meta-analyses on drugs presenting sophisticated analyses that went far beyond the capability of the author, without a word about who did the analyses (and presumably even wrote the paper). Similarly, many drug reviews are unlikely to have been written by the authors, as these professors probably have more important things to do than writing book-length drug reviews in sponsored supplements or peripheral journals that few would ever read and that have no impact factor,” according to 2009 research ( Gøtzsche, et al., 2009 ).

Such “honorary” or “guest” authorship has been linked to ghostwriting; academic dishonesty is a slippery slope.

Research supports the slippery slope theory. “It is this culture,” states 2010 research, “that pharmaceutical companies have tapped into, rather than inventing a new type of author. But by flattering academics into being guest authors, they have created, and then filled, a need for ghost authors to actually write the papers. The academics accepting the apparent honor of authorship thus provide cover – as accomplices or as dupes – for manipulative marketing practices” ( Barbour, 2010 ).

Finally, ghostwriting is a growing practice because it is often viewed as a slight, rather than as uncontested research misconduct. (Plagiarism, on the other hand, is an uncontested ethical failing). So in the face of economic and career rewards, the incentives to engage in ghostwriting outweighs the low risk of discipline.

When authors collaborate with industry and do not reveal this collaboration in clear ways, research loses integrity and thus erodes trust.

Transparency is a key component to research integrity. Knowing exactly who is writing the article and making clear any bias or influence is critical to accurate findings and research conclusions. According to medical writer Langdon-Neuner, “Articles ghost-written by medical writers engaged by pharmaceutical companies who have a vested interest in the content have caused concern after scandals revealed misleading content in some articles” ( Langdon-Neuner, 2008 )

Advertisements carry the name of the manufacturer whereas ghost-written articles do not reveal affiliation. Confusing the two results in medical decisions made by doctors and policy makers that affect health.

Scientific communication and scientific objectivity is a clear line that delineates research from marketing. This line must be upheld, according to Barton & Elliott, who state, “One approach to scientific objectivity holds that science is objective because of its procedures. According to this view, the foundation of scientific objectivity rests in the way scientists communicate and contest results. Helen Longino (2001) argues that scientific communities are objective insofar as their communication procedures are open and contestable. But ghostwritten papers conceal the interests of authors and sponsors in a way that makes it difficult to assess and contest the scientific data, which undermines the objectivity of science itself” (Moffatt & Elliott, 2007, p. 27 ).

Bosch and Ross go even further in saying that “ghostwriting and guest authorship are acts of research misconduct and deserve such widespread indignation because they entail maintaining secrecy, falsifying credentials, and fabricating the attribution of writing to another, representing an intentional and significant departure from accepted practices within the research community” ( Bosch & Ross, 2012 ).

When practitioners and policy makers make decisions for others based on research, that research needs to be transparent and accurate. The consequences of ghostwriting are widespread; by undermining the integrity of research, it removes critical data that influences how that data will then be used, whether it be policy decisions or a basis for further research.

First and foremost, raising awareness is the first step in preventing ghostwriting from occurring in research articles. #Pleasedontstealmywork in Denmark, for instance, documents instances of ghostwriting in order to make clear the prevalence of ghostwriting. When unknowing researchers understand that ghostwriting is a form of misconduct, they are dissuaded from engaging in dishonesty. And when those who knowingly engage in ghostwriting are under the spotlight, they are less likely to engage in research misconduct.

Journals can take part by requiring contributorship statements for publication . Additionally, they can ask authors to make clear any written contributions by private industry. It is not the participation with industry that makes ghostwriting unethical but the lack of transparency with partnerships. Acknowledging medical writers can clarify conflicts of interest–and make their contribution legitimate ( Yadav & Rawal, 2018 ).

From the initial steps of awareness and journal participation, institutional involvement helps enforce a culture of academic integrity around research. Encouraging universities to define ghostwriting as research misconduct is a way to impress the importance of authorship. Other institutional-level support involves forming a standing committee or task force to sanction ghostwriting ( Bosch & Ross, 2012 ).

Some suggestions are punitive, and go as far as making it standard practice that ghostwriters and guest authors be named as defendants in litigation against the pharmaceutical industry, per Moffatt and Elliott ( Moffatt & Elliott, 2007, p. 29 ). Certainly, this would be a deterrent. The lack of disciplinary measures to date has contributed to widespread ghostwriting. Plagiarism results in retractions and negative reputation; the same must happen when it comes to ghostwriting.

As with all academic integrity issues, we hope it doesn’t come to punishment and that such breaches are avoided through education. We hope that spotlighting ghostwriting helps spare unknowing participants of misconduct.

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Article Contents

Ghost or guest authors: some of the problems they create, prevalence of ghost and guest authorships, true authors, ghosts, or guests: can you tell, partial solutions, acknowledgments.

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Ghost and Guest Authors: You Can't Always Trust Who You Read

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Jerome Schofferman, F. Todd Wetzel, Christopher Bono, Ghost and Guest Authors: You Can't Always Trust Who You Read, Pain Medicine , Volume 16, Issue 3, March 2015, Pages 416–420, https://doi.org/10.1111/pme.12579

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Clinicians are expected to practice medicine based on the best available evidence. Medical school and post-graduate training provide a foundation for practice, but medicine is constantly evolving. In order to fulfill the obligations of highest quality clinical care and professionalism, physicians are required to participate in life-long learning. The most frequently used resources for continuing medical education (CME) are peer-reviewed medical journals and accredited CME courses. The quality and reliability of information presented in these educational formats are of paramount importance. Without attempting to assign a relative value of meetings over papers, the latter may be more influential over longer periods of time because of their permanency and accessibility.

In addition to original research, most medical journals publish systematic and narrative reviews that help clinicians stay current. In such reviews experts collect, distill, and evaluate original research articles from which they make recommendations that can significantly influence clinical practice. Such reviews are only as good as the publications upon which they are based.

Because of their important role in guiding medical practice, the authorship of articles must be honest, reliable, trust worthy and transparent. Otherwise the reader cannot adequately appraise the paper. Therefore, The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and others groups have issued guidelines for authorship [1,2] . Simply stated, all who contribute substantially should be listed as authors, and all who are listed as authors should have contributed substantially. Unfortunately this is not always the case. The scientific community is faced with the problems of ghost and guest authors.

A ghost author is a person who has made a substantial contribution to the research or writing of a manuscript but is not named as an author [2–4] . Those who make small contributions that would not qualify them as an author should be listed in the acknowledgements with the extent of their contribution clearly stated. In fact however, some of those acknowledged may have actually met criteria that would qualify them as an author, and so even though acknowledged, they are technically ghosts. A ghost author might be a direct employee or hired contract employee (e.g., medical communication company, professional medical writer) of a pharmaceutical company or medical device maker (collectively referred to as industry) and as such, there is a reasonable likelihood of bias.

A guest author is someone who is named as an author, but who did not contribute in a meaningful way to the design, research, analysis, or writing of a paper [2] . There are several varieties of guest authors [5] . Often they are well known and well respected thought leaders in the field of interest who are paid for use of their name. Some physicians accept honorary or gift authorship simply to enhance their curriculum vitae. Others might be invited to the masthead by the corresponding author in order to repay favors such as professional references or referrals [5] . At times, scientists agree to trade authorships by each placing their name on the others' papers so each appears more productive [5] . Some section or department heads are named as authors simply by virtue of their seniority or departmental tradition.

The presence of a well known guest author poses a substantial risk because the author's name could unfairly influence the opinion of clinicians, educators, and politicians about a particular drug or device [4] . The omission of an industry ghost author deprives the reader the ability to consider giving the paper less weight.

Although authorship issues can be present in any article, much of the concern is with industry sponsored work. It is necessary and beneficial for physicians and other scientists to collaborate with industry for medicine to advance. Such collaboration can be ethical and professional when fully transparent and appropriately managed. However, this is not always the case [6–10] .

There are several recent well-documented instances of ghost or guest authorship that involve medications prescribed or devices used by pain physicians [6,8] . Multiple papers extolling the off-label use of gabapentin had ghost authorship by medical communication companies [9] . A guest-authored study of rofecoxib omitted the deaths of several study patients and underestimated the incidence of cardiovascular deaths [8] . Guest authorship was eventually demonstrated in multiple articles on sertraline [8] . Most recently ghost and guest authors as well as ghost management has been well documented to have occurred in multiple papers regarding the use of recombinant bone morphogenetic protein [10] .

Many medical journals are paying more attention to the accuracy of authorship. The goal is not to stop industry-sponsored research, but to have any and all involvement of industry transparent and clearly disclosed in the manuscript. If any representative of a company provides input at any stage of the work, it must be disclosed fully. Those who make significant contributions should be listed as authors. No one should be listed simply to boost the credibility of the work.

Ghost and guest authorships are unprofessional and unethical. However, the most important and underlying issue is that ghost and guest authors have the potential to unjustly manipulate patient care through their influence on physicians and educators who read these articles. Such authorships deprive the reader of the chance to satisfactorily weigh a published paper.

The listing of a well known authority as an author gives a research or review paper an extra air of credibility that might not be warranted, and increases the possibility to influence a physician's choices [11] . Guest authors paid by industry for use of their name are certainly of more concern than honorary guest authors. Recommendations for interventional or pharmacological treatments based on articles with paid guest authors may not be in the best interests of patients, but might be in the best financial interest of a company.

Pain medicine specialists, especially interventionalists, have been criticized for using procedures and medications for which evidence is poor or lacking [12] . But pain specialists rely on the information they obtain from original science and narrative or systematic reviews in peer-reviewed journals, and they trust that the information is reliable. These author behaviors are a breakdown in that trust. The use of new treatments endorsed by guest experts or written by ghosts may not be in the best interests of patients in pain. Furthermore, such treatments are often new and expensive, and drive up health care costs. Although impossible to quantify the effect, ghosts missing or guests appearing on an article that presents a favorable impression of a drug or device might contribute to the problem of the overuse of unproven therapies.

One of, if not the major, reason for the persistence of ghostwriting is financial gain for the parties involved. Most ghost authors are employees of a company or are contracted by the company and as such profit directly [4] . This direct compensation might inject conscious or unconscious bias into data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Industry knows that a favorable article, especially in a peer-reviewed journal with a high impact factor, can serve as a potent marketing tool that can be used to support a particular drug or device.

Gotzsche et al. reported that most of the ghost authors on research papers were statisticians, often employed directly or indirectly by the sponsor. Such a ghost presents an obvious problem [13] . If a reader knew that the person responsible for data analysis (and perhaps collection) was an employee or agent of the company sponsoring the research, it empowers the reader to make an informed, decision on the credibility of the data [14] . By violating the tenet of transparency, ghost author(s) deprive the reader of the opportunity to account for the potential for bias in research design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation.

Estimates of the prevalence of ghost authorship vary widely. At one extreme, in a report of industry-initiated randomized trials published during 1994–5, Gotzsche and associates found evidence of ghost authors in 33 of 44 (75%) published trials [13] . More recently Wislar and associates surveyed the authors of articles of six medical journals with high impact factors [2] . They found the prevalence of articles with guest or ghost authorship was 21%, an improvement from the 29% seen in a 1996 study [2,15] . There were 17.6% with guest authors (25% in original research articles, 15% in review papers, and 11.2% in editorials) and 7.9% with ghosts (ghost author prevalence was 11.9% in original research articles, 6.0% in review papers, and 5.3% in editorials) [2] . They also observed that almost 8% of the articles they surveyed might have had an unnamed ghost author. In two surveys of different radiology journals, the prevalence of guest authors was 24.7% and 26%, respectively [16,17] . Some respondents noted that in their academic setting, senior faculty members were “automatically listed” [16,17] .

Kassirer recognizes the difficulty in finding the true prevalence of ghosts or guest authors, but writes that at least 10% of published papers have ghost writers and suggests number is probably higher [11] . In review of articles published in The Lancet in 2008 and 2009, Lundh et al. found that 8 of 12 “seemingly independent” trials (i.e., industry-funded trials that were reportedly conducted by academic researchers with the help of an unrestricted grant) had evidence of sponsor influence [7] . According to study protocols, sponsors were required to review, approve, or be involved in the writing of the manuscript in six papers. Only 1 of the 6 final publications reported any of this involvement.

It is virtually impossible to know if there are unnamed authors in a medical article—hence, the term “ghosts”. There are soft clues to ghosts, but none are definitive. Ghosting may be suggested if employees or agents of the sponsoring company are cited in the acknowledgements. If the narrative style of the paper differs greatly from other works of the first author, this might suggest ghostwriting to readers familiar with that author's previous writing.

Guest or honorary authors might be less difficult to recognize. Papers that list a large number of authors, but are not works of large well established academic societies or task forces could suggest that some did not perform sufficient work to qualify as a true author. The suspicion of honorary authorship may be raised if authors have produced a surprising large number of papers in a very short time. Unfortunately this suggestion taints honest productive authors.

It is clear that medical practice, medical education, and the professional and public trust are damaged by ghost writing and guest authors [2,4,6] . Recognition is hard, and policing complicated. In the very near future, the Sunshine Act will require that all money paid from a company to all physicians be disclosed on a web site accessible to all interested parties. This might discourage some guest authors from selling their name and industry from paying them. Also journal editors, and in some instances reviewers, will have this information to use in their decision process whether to publish a manuscript. Educators will be better able to know how heavily to rely on a particular paper.

Every manuscript should have an author who assumes full responsibility for adherence to ICJME guidelines or the guidelines of a particular journal. Ideally, the role of each author should be stated, a practice several journals currently require. Those who contributed to a lesser degree should be cited in the acknowledgements and their role spelled out. Persons should not be listed merely because of their academic rank or reciprocity.

Physicians should not accept authorship unless they have contributed substantially to the work. No author should be remunerated by a company simply for a review of a paper and permission to be listed as an author.

Journal Editors

Gotzsche recommends editors not accept meaningless acknowledgements [11] . He refers to ghost authorship as misconduct. He feels that journals and search engines be explicit and use the term “misappropriated authorship” rather than listing false authorship as an erratum [11] . It would also be feasible for journal editors to refuse to publish future papers of any authors found to be a ghost or guest.

In research that is funded by industry, journals should require company contributors to state their precise roles in research and manuscript preparation. Journals should require compliance with ICJME or other established guidelines as well as other each journal's disclosure requirements. Pain Medicine has explicit authorship criteria as well as instructions to authors that require adherence to ICJME and other disclosure guidance [18] .

Physicians at-Large

Physicians in practice and educators should read all medical articles with a practiced and critical eye, paying extra attention to those funded by industry. Readers must be especially wary of articles funded by industry unless the involvement is explicitly stated. If not stated, there is no way to know the extent of industry participation and so the findings and conclusions might be considered less reliable. Physicians should not accept articles from industry representatives who will only present those with favorable outcomes [2] .

Industry needs to accept the fact that using ghost authors or enticing thought leaders to be honorary authors is not ethical, and is not acceptable science or education. Ghost or guest authors dilute the credibility of all concerned [14] . Companies must disclose the role any representative of any company had with respect to research design, data collection, data analysis, and writing or editing the manuscript.

Universities and Other Research Centers

Medical schools and other research centers must play a role as well. There have been significant strides in this regard. A recent survey of medical schools found that 2/3 had authorship policies that specifically forbid ghost writing, a very marked improvement from their prior survey in 2008 [19] .

It is quite reasonable that a contract research organization (CRO) can be hired to develop and oversee an industry-sponsored study, and if in fact a well managed agreement can help provide a much needed firewall between the company and the research. It is necessary that such a relationship be fully disclosed in all manuscripts and presentations. In theory, the CRO does not necessarily rely on future business from the same company and are better able to do their work without oversight from the company.

Professional Medical Writers

Professional medical writers can be legitimate participants in scientific papers provided their role is transparent. They have communication expertise, which is very important for transmitting information to readers. If the medical writer has met ICMJE criteria for authorship, he or she should be listed. If not the role should be identified in the acknowledgements section with the extent of their role and the source of funding for the writer [11] . Gotzsche also feels that medical writers be named as authors.

Legal Remedies

As the problem appears to be difficult to control and regulate, some have proposed that lasting remedies will require legal action [20] . Bosch reviewed some novel theories of accountability for guest or ghost authors [20] . He suggests that if a manufacturer manages data to present an impression that a drug or device is safe and effective, and a guest author lends his or her name to such articles, then that ghost author could be held liable if a patient is harmed by the product.

The FDA regulates the marketing of approved products, and companies are permitted to market their devices only for their approved purposes. Physicians may however, legally use available products for other reasonable indications based on best available medical evidence that includes published research and possibly reviews, so called “off label” use. If a ghost writer, working for a company directly or as an agent of a company, influences a manuscript that discusses the off-label use of a product, this could be construed as illegal marketing since it is likely to expand the use of a product. However, a recent court ruling has muddied the water in this regard. In December of 2012, the 2 nd Court of Appeals found that a representative of a drug company may discuss off-label use of the company's approved drug as long as the communication is not misleading. The court found that to prevent this dialogue would be violation of Free Speech rights [21] .

Clinicians and educators rely on the published medical information. They trust that original research and narrative or systematic reviews are reliable and the authorship is transparent, but this is not always the case. Disclosure of conflicts of interest by authors is required by most journals, disclosure will not detect ghost or guest authorship. Ghosting or guesting is of more than academic interests because it can directly or indirectly affect patient care. Therefore it is important for readers to be aware of this issue, and to be alert to suggestions that particular works may be at increased risk for ghost or guest authors.

It is important to take a proactive stance against these practices. Industry, universities, research centers, and professional medical associations should be clear and unequivocal in condeming these practices. Processes need to be in place to investigate and, if need be, deal with violations. Clearly, we must all participate in this endeavor for professional, ethical, and most importantly, best patient care reasons.

We thank Eric Muehlbauer, Executive Director, North American Spine Society, for critical review of the manuscript and his input regarding the legal perspective.

Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals . Available at: www.ICMJE.org (accessed April 2013 ).

Wislar J Flanagin A Fontanarosa P DeAngelis C . Honorary and ghost authorship in high impact biomedical journals: A cross sectional survey . BMJ 2011 ; 343 : d6128 .

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Steinman M Bero L Chren M Landefeld C . Narrative review: The promotion of gabapentin: An analysis of internal industry documents . Ann Intern Med 2006 ; 145 : 284 – 293 .

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Science News

Ghost authors remain a chronic problem, share this:.

By Janet Raloff

September 11, 2009 at 2:06 am

VANCOUVER, B.C. Journal articles often list a long string of putative authors. I once counted 47 on a physics paper. But where journal articles in the natural sciences often appear overly conscientious about acknowledging all contributors, the opposite has become a nagging problem in biomedicine. Here, not all authors on a research project – or even, necessarily, the most important ones – may be identified as a contributor.

The existence of these ghost authors, as they’re called, evoked frustration and anger yesterday in a large share of the 400 journal editors and clinical research scientists taking part in a quadrennial international workshop on peer review and biomedical publication. This year’s venue: Vancouver, British Columbia.

The concern, speakers complained, is that ghost writers can be little more than hired guns. The expectation is that they will describe research findings in ways that aid their benefactors – drug or biomedical device companies that wish to avoid the appearance of directly influencing a clinical trial’s interpretation.

Often aiding and abetting the situation is another group of poseurs known as honorary authors. Their names show up on papers – despite their having done nothing – to lend credibility to research, to reward a friend of someone connected with the study, or to help hide the contributions of a ghost.

Both types of fraudulent authors have been around for a long time. But what disturbed the legions of editors meeting in Vancouver is that despite increasing efforts to rout these cheaters, the share of articles they influence seems to have changed little over the past decade.

For instance, Joseph Wislar and his colleagues at the Chicago-based JAMA — the Journal of the American Medical Association — surveyed corresponding authors of 630 papers published last year in major medical journals: Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, Nature Medicine , the New England Journal of Medicine and PLoS Medicine . In hopes of getting honest answers, the JAMA team offered authors anonymity by not linking their responses to particular papers.

A dozen years ago, Wislar noted, a similar study turned up evidence that honorary authors inflated the ranks of roughly one-in-five biomedical research papers, ghost authors contributed to nine percent of surveyed papers and two percent of the published articles analyzed had both ghosts and honorary authors.

Many top journals have attempted to crack down on such author fraud in recent years by asking whoever submits a manuscript to confirm that no one has contributed to the paper beyond those named and that everyone listed as authors contributed substantially. Editors at the New England Journal and PLoS Medicine , for instance, yesterday noted that they have such policies.

Despite this, Wislar reported, rates of author fraud in the 2008 papers that his team has probed show little improvement from the earlier analysis: 21 percent of papers still had honorary authors, eight percent had ghosts and two percent still had both.   Xiu-yuan Hao of the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House in Beijing reported finding the same types of author fraud in the Chinese Medical Journal . The first authors of 220 papers that had been published during the last four months of 2008 responded to his team’s questionnaire. These data indicate that 10.4 percent of the papers had ghosts and 28.6 percent had honorary authors (mostly heads of departments or other institutions).

Jenny White and Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed internal company records from Parke-Davis that had been unearthed as part of a lawsuit involving its drug gabapentin (Neurontin). Developed as an anticonvulsant, this medicine is also used for treating some types of intractable pain. The lawsuit argued that Parke-Davis wanted to encourage doctors to prescribe the drug for uses – like migraines and bipolar disease – and doses that had not been formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Some 900 company documents have been archived at UCSF. White and Bero correlated some of these documents from 1996 and 1997 with journal articles published shortly thereafter on new uses for the drug. White reported yesterday that they detailed evidence that Parke-Davis had plotted to get medical writers to place research papers on benefits of the drug in certain target journals. The company documents included records of payments to a medical-writing company it had hired to do this, she says.

Other documents identified huge sums that had been paid to one scientist for speaking engagements and other consulting tasks. This scientist ultimately ended up being the sole author of one notable paper on the drug. And probably an honorary author at that, White says, because the industry documents suggest a ghost author had drafted the paper.

Contends White: “Parke-Davis was really very aggressively marketing gabapentin back in the ‘90s.” Documents in the UCSF archive indicate that the company was attempting to get research data published that it could then use to help sell doctors on prescribing its drug even more.

“That was the primary objective of getting these prestigious ghost authors to put their names to the articles,” White says. In essence, she contends, Parke-Davis’ goal “was really publication as marketing. Which distorts the scientific record and was very harmful, ultimately, to science and how people make treatment decisions.”

The data presented yesterday riled up a number of journal editors. “This is completely outrageous,” said Ginny Barbour, chief editor of PLoS Medicine in Cambridge, England. It suggests that the authors of a nontrivial number of papers – even in the top tier journals – “have been lying to us.”

For instance, the JAMA team reported yesterday that authors of papers in PLoS Medicine – which has always prohibited ghost and honorary authorship – continue to flaunt the rules. Any author who goes unacknowledged “is presumably someone whose work was paid for by a company,” Barbour says. And trying to hide that fact, she maintains, immediately “throws into substantial doubt the whole study.”

In an editorial published in PLoS Medicine this week, Barbour noted, “We’ve said that if we find a published paper has been ghost written, it should be retracted.” Employers of the authors on that paper should be informed of the fraud, she added, and the entire string of authors on the offending paper would likely be barred from publishing in her journal for some as-yet-unspecified period.

What’s especially troubling about the JAMA team’s new report, Barbour adds, is the nature of papers now being ghosted. In the past, she says, there’s been almost a tacit acceptance of it by journals because it was supposedly restricted almost exclusively to review papers. “But we now find it’s occurring in original research as well,” she observes, “where it poses a very serious threat to the integrity of the medical literature.”

Indeed, the new JAMA analysis found: “Ghosts were more prevalent in research articles (12 percent) vs reviews (6 percent) and editorials (5 percent).”

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Ghost Authorship

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So-called “ghost authorship” may not truly constitute authorship, although in extreme cases, a ghost author may have met all four ICMJE criteria.

Updated on January 16, 2014

In this article, we extend our previous discussion of  the ethics of manuscript authorship  to an issue that haunts both academia and industry: ghost authorship.  Ghost authorship  is essentially the opposite of  honorary authorship , entailing a significant contribution to a manuscript without acknowledgment of that contribution. The most well-known scenario involves a professional medical writer or an industry researcher who drafts an article on behalf of a pharmaceutical company but is not credited for this work. These  ghostwriters  may be concealed to obscure industry backing for research, improving the apparent objectivity of a paper while maintaining the company's control over its content. This concealment is often coupled with guest authorship, the practice of adding a reputable academic researcher's name to a manuscript to increase its credibility, despite little to no actual involvement. In other cases, a scientist may employ, but not acknowledge, a ghostwriter to overcome an obstacle to publication, such as poor writing skills, limited time, or a lack of familiarity with journal requirements. Additional unattributed contributions may entail data collection or analysis or other potentially critical facets of the research process. One  BMJ  survey  found that such ghost authorship was present in approximately one-tenth of papers published in six medical journals in 2008.

How does ghost authorship relate to the authorship guidelines established by the  International Committee of Medical Journal Editors  (ICMJE)? Based on the previously discussed  criteria , solely writing or editing a manuscript, for example, does not merit author status; involvement in the study design or data collection/analysis, approval of the final draft of the paper, and accountability for the entire work are also required. Similarly, industry researchers who conduct a study and draft a report based on its results but do not approve the final version are technically not eligible for authorship, whereas a guest author who makes minor contributions to these steps and performs the approval is qualified. As a result, so-called “ghost authorship” may not truly constitute authorship, although in extreme cases, a ghost author may have met all four ICMJE criteria.

Even though the ICMJE guidelines do not support writing alone and other focused activities as “substantive intellectual contributions,” they do state that “writing assistance” and other non-author-level technical aid should be cited in the acknowledgments section of a paper. However,  it has been argued  that writing a manuscript is in fact a significant contribution, particularly because communicating complex scientific findings frequently requires understanding and interpreting the data. Based on this argument, the ICMJE definition of what merits authorship attribution would have to be revised or even  replaced with a list of diverse contributions .

From an ethical standpoint, ghost authorship, particularly in conjunction with guest authorship, entails deception of the research community, which may not be able to properly assess a study's validity and credibility. The named authors' integrity may additionally be eroded, including due to falsification of their publication records. In the worst instances of ghost authorship, when the suppression of industry ties also hides biased data collection and/or interpretation, derivative research studies and clinical care may be negatively affected. Moreover, these practices may violate the standards of the  ICMJE  and the  Committee on Publication Ethics  (COPE) on the disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. Given these ethical breaches, researchers  Peter C. Gøtzsche  and  Xavier Bosch , among others, contend that ghost authorship should be treated as research misconduct by governments, research institutions, funding agencies, and/or editors' associations, which is currently not a widespread approach.

COPE  and the  World Association of Medical Editors  have published explicit statements against ghost authorship. Several of their recommended methods to combat both ghost and guest authorship are as follows:

• Journals should set clear authorship criteria
• Authors should disclose all contributors, regardless of author status, and their specific individual contributions and affiliations
• Authors should sign a formal declaration about their contributions
• Authors should complete a checklist if they received help from a medical writer (as outlined in Table 1 in  this 2009  PLOS Medicine  article )

To further reduce the frequency of ghost authorship and to improve transparency about contributors, other approaches outlined in the  PLOS Medicine  paper cited above and a  subsequent editorial  include

• Publishing the comprehensive list of contributions described above and a detailed acknowledgments section
• Asking authors specific questions about the writing of the manuscript, including who wrote the first draft
• Requiring all company, drug, and medical writer involvement to be described in a supplement, possibly with legal validation

In sum, whether or not a ghost author merits author status, concealing contributions to a manuscript is an unethical practice that runs counter to current guidelines and will likely be increasingly targeted by future policies. As you conduct your own research, be sure to keep a careful record of all contributors and affiliations so that you can give credit where credit is due in your paper. Please email us at  [email protected]  with any questions about authorship issues or publication practices in general.

Michaela Panter, PhD

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• Honorary and ghost...

Honorary and ghost authorship in high impact biomedical journals: a cross sectional survey

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This article has a correction. Please see:

• Errata - November 24, 2011
• Joseph S Wislar , survey research specialist, JAMA ,
• Annette Flanagin , managing deputy editor, JAMA ,
• Phil B Fontanarosa , executive editor, JAMA ,
• Catherine D DeAngelis , editor emerita, JAMA
• 1 American Medical Association, 515 N State Street, Chicago, Illinois 60654, USA
• Correspondence to: J S Wislar joseph.wislar{at}jama-archives.org
• Accepted 23 August 2011

Objectives To assess the prevalence of honorary and ghost authors in six leading general medical journals in 2008 and compare this with the prevalence reported by authors of articles published in 1996.

Design Cross sectional survey using a web based questionnaire.

Setting International survey of journal authors.

Participants Sample of corresponding authors of 896 research articles, review articles, and editorial/opinion articles published in six general medical journals with high impact factors in 2008: Annals of Internal Medicine , JAMA , Lancet , Nature Medicine , New England Journal of Medicine , and PLoS Medicine .

Main outcome measures Self reported compliance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for authorship for all authors on the selected articles.

Results A total of 630/896 (70.3%) corresponding authors responded to the survey. The prevalence of articles with honorary authorship or ghost authorship, or both, was 21.0% (95% CI 18.0% to 24.3%), a decrease from 29.2% reported in 1996 (P=0.004). Based on 545 responses on honorary authorship, 96 articles (17.6% (95% CI 14.6% to 21.0%)) had honorary authors (range by journal 12.2% to 29.3%), a non-significant change from 1996 (19.3%; P=0.439). Based on 622 responses on ghost authorship, 49 articles (7.9% (6.0% to 10.3%)) had ghost authors (range by journal 2.1% to 11.0%), a significant decline from 1996 (11.5%; P=0.023). The prevalence of honorary authorship was 25.0% in original research reports, 15.0% in reviews, and 11.2% in editorials, whereas the prevalence of ghost authorship was 11.9% in research articles, 6.0% in reviews, and 5.3% in editorials.

Conclusions Evidence of honorary and ghost authorship in 21% of articles published in major medical journals in 2008 suggests that increased efforts by scientific journals, individual authors, and academic institutions are essential to promote responsibility, accountability, and transparency in authorship, and to maintain integrity in scientific publication.

Introduction

Inappropriate authorship (honorary and ghost authorship) and the resulting lack of transparency and accountability have been substantial concerns for the academic community for decades. 1 2 3 4 5 The importance of integrity in authorship has concerned scientific journals, 4 5 6 and recent reports of inappropriate authorship 7 8 have captured the attention of the news media and government officials. 9 10

Inappropriate authorship may involve honorary authors, individuals who are named as authors but who have not met authorship criteria 11 and have not contributed substantially to be able to take public responsibility for the work, 5 12 13 and ghost authors, individuals who have made substantial contributions to the work reported in an article but who are not named as authors. 5 12 13 Previous research has documented prevalences of honorary and ghost authors of 19% and 11%, respectively, in articles published in biomedical journals in 1996, 14 and of 39% and 9%, respectively, in review articles published by the Cochrane Library in 1999. 15

In the 1980s, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) developed guidelines for responsible and accountable authorship. 11 These criteria have been updated regularly and have been adopted by more than 600 biomedical journals. The ICMJE guidelines include specific requirements for authorship, and stipulate that all authors should participate sufficiently in the work reported in an article to be able to take public responsibility for the content or an important part of the content (see web extra table 1 on bmj.com).

In this study, we surveyed corresponding authors of articles published in 2008 in six general medical journals to determine the prevalence of articles with honorary authors and ghost authors and to compare this with the prevalence reported in 1996. 14 We hypothesised that the prevalence of articles with honorary and ghost authorship would decline, that the prevalence of honorary and ghost authors would vary by article type, and that inappropriate authorship would be more prevalent in the two journals in our study that do not publicly require and report author contributions than in the four journals that do.

The study included the six general biomedical journals with the highest impact factors in 2008 according to the Institute for Scientific Information’s Journal Citation Report : Annals of Internal Medicine , JAMA , Lancet , Nature Medicine , New England Journal of Medicine , and PLoS Medicine . 16 In 2008 these journals followed ICMJE guidelines for authorship (see web extra table 1).

As in the 1996 study, we included three types of articles from these journals: original research reports (research); reviews, including meta-analyses (reviews); and editorials, commentaries, and other opinion articles (editorials). Before we established a sampling frame, two of us (JSW and AF) evaluated each article type by journal based on criteria established a priori. These authors reviewed three journals each, randomly checked each other’s coding, discussed any uncertainties or discrepancies, and resolved these differences by consensus. After identifying all of these article types published in 2008 in the six journals, we used a random number generator to select a stratified random sample of articles from each journal reflecting the proportion of the three types of articles published in each journal and the proportion of the total number of articles published by all six journals.

The corresponding author of each selected article was identified. If an article designated more than one corresponding author, one of these authors was randomly selected. Articles (primarily editorials) written by journal editors and staff writers and high government officials (without publicly available personal email addresses) were not eligible for inclusion and, if selected, were replaced with a randomly selected article of the same type from the same journal. If a corresponding author appeared in more than one selected article, only one of these was randomly chosen and the other article replaced with a random selection (see web extra figure on bmj.com).

The corresponding authors of sampled articles were sent an email message in April 2009 inviting them to complete an online questionnaire and explaining that participation was voluntary and that their identities and responses would be kept confidential. Up to three reminder emails were sent to non-responders at about one week intervals. No incentive or compensation was offered for participation.

We developed an online questionnaire based on the mail questionnaire used in the 1996 survey. 14 The questionnaire consisted of 30 questions about the corresponding author, the contributions and functions of all authors, and writing and editing assistance and other contributions from unnamed authors and other individuals (see web extra questionnaire on bmj.com). The questionnaire was pretested among a sample of 15 authors and editors who were not included in the final study.

Using the same base definition as that used in the 1996 survey 14 (based on the ICMJE authorship criteria 11 ), we defined an article as having an honorary author if the corresponding author reported any of the following:

1) An author did not meet these three criteria:

( a ) “conceiving and designing the work,” “analysing and interpreting the data,” or “collecting data or other material” (we included data collection as an acceptable criterion for authorship because the ICMJE had added this to their guidelines before we conducted this study)

( b ) “writing the manuscript or part of the manuscript” or “revising the manuscript to make important changes in content”

( c ) “approving the final version of the manuscript”

2) An author did not “feel comfortable explaining the major conclusions” of the article

3) An author performed “only one function, and nothing else” from a list of 17 activities: supervising the work of any of the coauthors; recruiting coauthors; recruiting study subjects; analysing or interpreting data; conducting literature search; analysing or interpreting literature; reviewing the manuscript; communicating with journal editor(s); signing the statement of copyright transfer to the journal; conceiving and designing the work; collecting data and other material; obtaining funding or material support; performing statistical analysis; writing the manuscript or part of the manuscript; approving the manuscript before submission to a journal; revising the manuscript or making important changes in content; reviewing page proofs or the journal’s edited version of the manuscript (see questions 8, 9, and revised question 11 in the study questionnaire on bmj.com).

Using the same definition as that used in the 1996 survey, 14 we defined an article as having a ghost author if the corresponding author reported any of the following:

1) An individual who was not listed as an author made contributions that merited authorship

2) An unnamed individual participated in writing the article.

We also examined the acknowledgment and methods sections of articles meeting these criteria for indications of writing and editing assistance (see questions 13, 17, and 19 in the study questionnaire on bmj.com).

We determined the prevalences of articles with honorary authorship or ghost authorship, or both, in 2008 in these six high impact journals and compared these prevalences to those reported in the six journals in the 1996 study. 14 We also compared prevalences of inappropriate authorship between 2008 and 1996 by article type (research, review, editorial). Because the earlier study was limited to US based corresponding authors and included only three of the six journals in the current study, we also conducted a secondary analysis comparing the prevalence of honorary authors and ghost authors in the three journals included in both the 1996 study and in the present study ( Annals of Internal Medicine , JAMA , and New England Journal of Medicine ) using a subsample of the 2008 sample that only included US-based corresponding authors.

Four journals in this study ( Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, and PLoS Medicine ), publicly require (that is, in their instructions for authors) authors to report their individual contributions and publish these contributions in the article. Two journals ( New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine ) do not publicly require reporting of individual author contributions and do not routinely publish these contributions in the article. In a subanalysis we compared the prevalence of honorary and guest authors in the journals that required reporting of author contributions versus those without such requirements.

Statistical analysis

Each article served as the unit of analysis for determining the prevalence of honorary or ghost authors. We hypothesised a 10% reduction in the prevalence of articles with honorary or ghost authors from the 29% prevalence reported in the previous study of six journals in 1996. 14 We estimated that 149 articles would be required to detect this difference with β of 0.20 and a two tailed α of 0.05. Assuming a 67% response rate (based on recent JAMA author surveys), we estimated that we needed to sample at least 223 corresponding authors to ensure an adequate sample of 149 completed surveys. Using the same parameters, we estimated that 587 articles would be needed for the subanalyses comparing the four journals with and the two journals without requirements for reporting author contributions. Again assuming a 67% response rate, we estimated that we needed to sample at least 877 authors to achieve the minimum of 587. Corresponding author response rates were calculated according to American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) standard definitions. 17

We used χ 2 tests to compare proportions between journals and groups of journals, and to compare prevalences between the two studies (1996 and 2008). Prevalence estimates and adjusted Wald 95% confidence intervals were also calculated. Statistical analyses were computed with SPSS 14.0. 18

Sample characteristics

In 2008, these six, high impact, general medical journals published 2297 research, review, and editorial articles. A randomly selected, stratified sample of 896 corresponding authors of these articles were invited to complete the survey online (see web extra figure on bmj.com). Usable questionnaires were completed by 630 authors, for an overall response rate of 70.3% (range 58.3% to 85.9% across journals; see web extra table 2 on bmj.com). There were no statistically significant differences in response rates by article type; 67.3% of corresponding authors of research articles, 76.0% of review article authors, and 70.4% of editorial authors responded (P=0.117). However, there were differences across journals (P<0.001; web extra table 2).

Thus, the final analytic dataset included 630 articles for the general analyses. For analyses of honorary authorship, 545 authors submitted complete usable surveys; and for analyses of ghost authorship, 622 authors submitted complete usable surveys (web extra figure). The ghost author analyses were limited to 622 because of missing data from eight surveys. One of the original questions on honorary authorship in the 1996 questionnaire was slightly modified for ease of use in our internet based survey. Some implausible responses were discovered to that question after the survey was completed. Therefore, corresponding authors of all multi-authored articles were re-surveyed (n=501) with a single question worded exactly like the question in the earlier survey. 14 Usable surveys were received from 426 of these corresponding authors for a response rate of 85.0%. Thus, for honorary authorship analyses, 545 articles were available after excluding authors of multi-authored articles who did not respond to the second survey and those from single authored articles with implausible data (web extra figure).

Corresponding authors who responded to the questionnaire were mostly men (75.2%), reported having an MD degree (72.7%), had academic appointments (88.4%), resided in the United States or Canada (63.0%) or Europe (28.7%), and reported having published more than 20 articles in the previous five years (62.7%; web extra table 3). The sampled articles closely reflected the proportions of articles published by the six journals, and included 230 (36.5%) research articles, 136 (21.6%) reviews, and 264 (41.9%) editorials (web extra table 4).

Inappropriate authorship

In the full sample (n=630) the prevalence of articles with honorary authorship, ghost authorship, or both was 21.0% (95% confidence interval 18.0% to 24.3%). Compared with the prevalence of inappropriate authorship reported in the 1996 study (29.2% (26.1% to 32.4%)), 14 there was a significant decline in the overall prevalence of articles with honorary or ghost authors in 2008 (P=0.0004).

Of the 545 articles with usable data on the honorary authorship questions, 96 (17.6%) met criteria for honorary authorship (table ⇓ ). Nearly all of these (93) were articles in which the corresponding author reported that one or more co-authors performed only one function, thus not meeting ICMJE authorship criteria (see web extra table 5). Prevalence ranged from 12.2% to 29.3% by journal (P=0.134), and was 25.0% for research articles, 11.2% for editorials, and 15.0% for reviews (P=0.0007). The prevalence of honorary authorship in 2008 (17.6% (14.6% to 21.0%)) was not significantly different from the prevalence in 1996 (19.3% (16.7% to 22.2%)) 14 (P=0.439). The 2008 prevalence of honorary authors for research articles was significantly higher than in 1996 (25.0% (19.7% to 31.1%) v 16.3% (13.3% to 19.9%), P=0.006), but was significantly lower for review articles (15.0% (9.6% to 22.6%) v 25.5% (20.4% to 31.4%), P=0.023) and editorials (11.2% (7.5% to 16.3%) v 20.8% (13.1% to 31.2%), P=0.038).

Prevalence of honorary and ghost authors in a sample of 630 research, review, and editorial articles published in six general medical journals with high impact factors in 2008, by journal and article type

• View inline

A total of 49 (7.9%) of 622 articles met the criteria for ghost authorship (table ⇑ ). Prevalence ranged from 2.1% to 11.0% across the six journals, and was 11.9% for research articles, 6.0% for reviews, and 5.3% for editorials (P=0.017). Compared with the results for 1996, 14 ghost author prevalence in 2008 was significantly lower (11.5% (9.5% to 13.9%) v 7.9% (6.0% to 10.3%), P=0.023). The prevalence of ghost authors was not significantly different by article type between 2008 and 1996.

In addition, because of the potential for non-response bias, we calculated a conservative prevalence estimate by assuming that all articles for which corresponding authors were non-respondents had no honorary or ghost authors. Under these assumptions and based on a denominator of 896 corresponding authors, the prevalence of articles with honorary authorship or ghost authorship would be 14.7% (132/896), the prevalence of articles with honorary authorship would be 10.7% (96/896), and the prevalence of articles with ghost authorship would be 5.6% (49/896).

In a secondary analysis of the three journals included in both the 2008 and 1996 surveys ( Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA , and New England Journal of Medicine ), and including only corresponding authors from the US (as in the 1996 study), the overall prevalence of articles with honorary authorship was 21.7% (18.0% to 25.8%) in 1996 14 and 11.4% (8.0% to 16.0%) in 2008 (P=0.0008), and the overall prevalence of articles with ghost authorship was 12.0% (9.2% to 15.4%) in 1996 14 and 7.4% (4.8% to 11.2%) in 2008 (P=0.0497).

Comparison of the four journals that indicate a requirement for authors to report their individual contributions ( Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet , and PLoS Medicine) with the two journals that do not have such public requirements ( New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine) showed no statistically significant differences in the prevalence of articles with honorary authors (18.5% v 16.0%, P=0.461) or ghost authors (7.3% v 9.0%, P=0.455). However, the journals without public requirements for reporting individual contributions (such as in instructions for authors) may have had private guidance for authors about appropriate authorship (such as in letters requesting revision).

Among the 630 articles in this study, 121 (19.2%) included acknowledgment sections that identified contributions to the manuscript such as review, advice, comments, analysis, and various forms of assistance. Of these, 40 (6.3%) specifically identified writing, editing, editorial assistance or writing, or manuscript preparation. Among the 49 articles that met criteria for ghost authorship, seven (14%) included an acknowledgment of writing or editorial contributions from non-authors in the acknowledgment section. No acknowledgment of writing or editorial assistance was noted in the methods section of any of these articles.

Principal findings

Inappropriate authorship (honorary and ghost authorship is an important issue for the academic and research community and is a threat to the integrity of scientific publication. Our findings suggest that 21% of articles published in 2008 in the general medical journals with the highest impact factors had an inappropriate honorary author, and that nearly 8% of articles published in these journals may have had an unnamed important contributor. The highest prevalence of both types of inappropriate authorship occurred in original research articles, compared with editorials and review articles. When looking at temporal trends from 1996 to 2008, we found a decline in the overall prevalence of inappropriate authorship (29.1% in 1996 v 21.0% in 2008), no significant change in the prevalence of honorary authorship (19.3% v 17.6%), and a decline in the prevalence of ghost authors (11.5% v 7.9%).

Comparison with other studies

This study directly updates our previous study that looked only at US based authors who published in three general medical journals and three specialty journals. 14 Our current study selected articles published in six general medical journals with the highest impact factors regardless of the corresponding author’s location.

Shapiro et al examined authorship in a sample of articles published in 10 leading biomedical journals in 1989, limited to articles with four or more authors with US addresses. 19 Based on the first author’s responses, Shapiro et al reported a prevalence of honorary authorship of 26%. 19 Our current study broadened the scope of this early work by including international authors and focused on biomedical journals with high impact factors. Although our study included articles published 19 years after the study by Shaprio et al, we found only a small decline in honorary authorship (17.6%). Shapiro et al did not report findings for ghost authorship.

Goodman surveyed the first authors of all research papers published in five consecutive issues of a general medical journal in 1993. 20 This small study (12 of 14 first authors responded) found that 64% of 84 authors and coauthors reportedly satisfied authorship criteria.

Similar to the current study, Mowatt et al used ICMJE authorship criteria to define honorary and ghost authors in a sample of reviews published by the Cochrane Library in 1999. 15 They found a high prevalence of honorary authors (39%) and a lower prevalence of ghost authors (9%). This study was not limited by the author’s geographical location, but was limited to a single publication ( Cochrane Library ) and type of article (review). Our current study included more publications and updates the prevalence rates by another nine years.

Strengths and limitations

This evaluation of inappropriate authorship has several limitations. Firstly, because only six general biomedical journals with high impact factors were included, these results may not be generalisable to other medical journals, such as biomedical specialty journals, journals with lower impact factors, or scientific journals in other disciplines. However, these six journals are considered among the most influential journals in medicine, and all have rigorous guidelines for authors. We suspect that the prevalence of inappropriate authorship could be even higher in journals with less rigorous standards.

Secondly, the analyses are based on self reported data from corresponding authors. Shapiro et al had asked corresponding authors to report the level of confidence they had in identifying the contributions of their co-authors 19 ; we did not include this assessment. Some under-reporting of honorary and ghost authors may be expected, based on social desirability bias, even though respondents were assured of the confidentiality of their survey responses. Moreover, if under-reporting did occur, it would mean that our results are underestimates of the extent of inappropriate authorship. However, the sample included in our study was representative of the article types from each of the selected journals, and the high response rate suggests that the participating authors were representative of authors who publish in these journals.

Thirdly, we cannot rule out the possibility of recall bias. Corresponding authors may not have accurately recalled their or their co-authors’ activities and contributions to a particular publication. However, the articles selected for inclusion in our study were all published in 2008, and corresponding authors were surveyed in April 2009. Furthermore, the journals included in our study are all major journals, and have relatively short intervals from manuscript submission to publication. This interval from manuscript preparation to the administration of our survey would probably not have been a major factor in inaccurate reporting of the contributions of co-authors or recall bias. Although it is possible that the corresponding author of an article might not be the person most closely involved with manuscript preparation, in most cases the corresponding author coordinates the activities of other authors, represents the interests of other authors during interactions with journal editors, and often serves as the “guarantor” for the manuscript. Thus, the corresponding author would be the person most likely to have knowledge of the roles and contributions of other authors.

Fourthly, as in previous research on authorship, 14 15 we used ICMJE authorship criteria to define honorary and ghost authors. The ICMJE authorship criteria might not have been widely known or followed by the authors who participated in our study. However, these authorship criteria are readily available and are generally accepted and followed by hundreds of biomedical journals, including the six journals included in this study. Furthermore, we specifically included “data collection” as an acceptable contribution for authorship for the first set of criteria (ICMJE added this to the criteria before this study was conducted). The number of honorary authors, however, did not change when this criterion was removed in a post hoc reanalysis. In addition, we included a list of 17 common contributions to help elicit who contributed what to the published articles.

Policy implications

Our findings suggest that additional measures are necessary by scientific journals, individual authors, and academic institutions to prevent a practice that might lead to loss of public confidence. Scientific journals have taken steps to strengthen authorship policies, such as requiring that each author report his or her contributions to the published work. 6 12 13 21 22 However, in our study, the secondary analyses comparing journals that have and those that do not have public requirements for reporting authorship contributions did not show a statistically significant difference in prevalence of inappropriate authorship. This may have been a result of the two journals without public requirements having private guidance on appropriate authorship, or this observation might reflect a “herd” effect.

Both honorary and ghost authorship are unacceptable in scientific publications, and each form of inappropriate authorship has important consequences. Honorary authorship has implications for scientific integrity, in that individuals who have not contributed to the work or manuscript sufficiently to merit authorship but who are named as authors are misrepresenting their contributions in the scientific literature. This may have implications for promotion and tenure committees that examine a faculty member’s number of publications rather than that faculty member’s substantive contributions to the work. Moreover, in cases of scientific misconduct involving published articles, honorary authors may be held accountable and responsible even though they may not have contributed to the work to even merit authorship. Likewise, ghost authorship has important implications and consequences. If un-identified authors are involved in the work and manuscript preparation, readers not only will be unaware of the contributions, perspectives, and affiliations of these individuals, but also may not appreciate the influence or potential underlying agenda these individuals may have on the reporting of material in the article (such as may occur with ghost authors employed by industry).

There has been increased attention to taking steps to help “flesh out” ghost authors by requesting that authors provide details about the contributions of others who are not named as authors. According to the ICMJE guidelines: “All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general support. Editors should ask corresponding authors to declare whether they had assistance with study design, data collection, data analysis, or manuscript preparation. If such assistance was available, the authors should disclose the identity of the individuals who provided this assistance and the entity that supported it in the published article. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.” 11

Making the requirement for reporting individual contributions more rigorous, such as by requiring signed statements from each author attesting to his or her contributions, by publishing those detailed contributions as part of the article (even if online only), and by asking the corresponding author to verify and vouch for the reported contributions of co-authors, may increase the effectiveness of this approach. Journals could also remind authors to identify all people who have contributed substantially to the work and specifically note writing of the manuscript in this regard. For example, the journal Neurology specifically requires identification of the person who wrote the first draft of the manuscript. 22

As with the suggested approaches for addressing suspected scientific misconduct, 23 24 maintaining integrity in authorship requires the commitment of individual researchers and the oversight of academic institutions. These institutions should evaluate their policies and procedures governing authorship to ensure that individuals whose names appear on published articles qualify for authorship and that articles on which faculty members are named as authors do not also have ghost authors. Departmental research committees and institutional promotions committees should evaluate each article on which a faculty member is listed as an author, and require that the individual’s contributions are clearly listed. Academic and research institutions should develop guidelines for reporting cases of potential inappropriate authorship, and establish clear policies and procedures for confidential reporting of these concerns, and mechanisms for objective investigation of allegations of potential inappropriate authorship.

Conclusions

Ensuring appropriate authorship remains an important issue for authors, academic and research institutions, and scientific journals. Full transparency in authorship is essential for maintaining integrity and accountability in scientific publication and ensuring public confidence in medical research. The results of this study should raise awareness among the scientific community about the importance of ensuring appropriate authorship credit and responsibility. Future research should continue to monitor inappropriate authorship and investigate ways that the scientific community could increase its effectiveness in addressing the problem.

What is already known on this topic

The presence of inappropriate (honorary and ghost) authors and the associated lack of transparency and accountability is an important problem for scientific journals, researchers, and academic institutions

Studies have found the prevalence of honorary authors to be as high as 39% and prevalence of ghost authors as high as 11% in a range of biomedical journals and types of articles

What this study adds

This study suggests that, among articles published in six high impact, general medical journals in 2008, the overall prevalence of articles with honorary authorship, ghost authorship, or both, was 21.0%, a decline from 29.1% in 1996

There was no change in the prevalence of honorary authors relative to 1996, but the prevalence of ghost authorship showed a significant decline

Inappropriate authorship remains a problem in high impact biomedical publications

Cite this as: BMJ 2011;343:d6128

We thank Angela Grayson, Jeni Reiling, and Reuben Rios, JAMA assistant editors, for research assistance.

An earlier version of this research was presented at the Sixth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, 10 September 2009, Vancouver BC, Canada.

Contributors: JW collected and analysed the data. All authors (CD, AF, PF, JW) participated in the design of the study, interpretation of the results, the writing of the manuscript, and review and approval of the final manuscript. All authors had full access to all the data, including statistical reports and tables, in the study and can take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Funding: The authors are employed as editors with JAMA , one of the journals included in this study. All costs of the study were met by JAMA .

Competing interests: All authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare that none of the authors, their spouses or families, have any financial or non-financial interests or relationships that may be relevant to the submitted work

Ethical approval: Not required. In the invitation letter and at the beginning of the survey, participants were assured of confidentiality and the voluntary nature of their participation if they chose to participate. Participation was voluntary.

Data sharing: A de-identified raw dataset and accompanying analytical files are available from Joseph Wislar at [email protected]

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode .

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Research Article

And the credit goes to … - Ghost and honorary authorship among social scientists

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations TIME Research Area, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, Department of Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, Institute for Applied Data Science & Finance, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations TIME Research Area, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, Institute for Applied Data Science & Finance, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland

• Gernot Pruschak, 
• Christian Hopp

• Published: May 5, 2022
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

The proliferation of team-authored academic work has led to the proliferation of two kinds of authorship misconduct: ghost authorship, in which contributors are not listed as authors and honorary authorship, in which non-contributors are listed as authors. Drawing on data from a survey of 2,222 social scientists from around the globe, we study the prevalence of authorship misconduct in the social sciences. Our results show that ghost and honorary authorship occur frequently here and may be driven by social scientists’ misconceptions about authorship criteria. Our results show that they frequently deviate from a common point of authorship reference (the ICMJE authorship criteria). On the one hand, they tend to award authorship more broadly to more junior scholars, while on the other hand, they may withhold authorship from senior scholars if those are engaged in collaborations with junior scholars. Authorship misattribution, even if it is based on a misunderstanding of authorship criteria rather than egregious misconduct, alters academic rankings and may constitute a threat to the integrity of science. Based on our findings, we call for journals to implement contribution disclosures and to define authorship criteria more explicitly to guide and inform researchers as to what constitutes authorship in the social sciences. Our results also hold implications for research institutions, universities, and publishers to move beyond authorship-based citation and publication rankings in hiring and tenure processes and instead to focus explicitly on contributions in team-authored publications.

Citation: Pruschak G, Hopp C (2022) And the credit goes to … - Ghost and honorary authorship among social scientists. PLoS ONE 17(5): e0267312. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312

Editor: Alberto Baccini, University of Siena, Italy, ITALY

Received: September 26, 2020; Accepted: April 7, 2022; Published: May 5, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Pruschak, Hopp. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data cannot be made publicly available due to them containing sensitive information on respondents’ authorship malpractices in previous publications. While the data is anonymized, certain combinations of demographics might still reveal survey participants’ identities. This could compromise survey participants and violate respondents’ privacy. Moreover, the GDPR prohibits the public sharing of any data that might lead to the identification of individuals. When providing their informed consent to participate in the study, participants were ensured their privacy would be protected. They did not provide consent for their data to be shared in a repository. Data requests must be addressed to the Data Protection Officer at Bern University of Applied Sciences, who will provide access after the signing of a non-disclosure agreement: [email protected] .

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

“Publish or Perish” characterizes the academic reward system across scientific disciplines. Hiring and tenure decisions depend upon publication metrics, and funding agencies are increasingly employing publications as their main criteria [ 1 – 5 ]. For academics, competition for publication spots in top-tier journals is fierce [ 6 – 8 ]. Responding to the increasingly complex nature of academic inquiries [ 9 ], and the competition in academia, researchers are working more frequently in teams [ 10 , 11 ].

Team-authored academic work allows researchers to increase their productivity by profiting from specialization and the division of labor [ 12 , 13 ]. Bringing together scientists from different backgrounds enhances creativity and the depth of the work [ 14 , 15 ], as well as–through mutual checks for potential errors–reproducibility [ 16 ]. Nonetheless, the rise of co-authorship also opened the door for new areas of academic misconduct. In team-authored work, it has become possible to withhold authorship from heavily engaged contributors (ghost authorship) and/or to award authorship to someone who didn’t participate in a research project (honorary authorship) [ 17 ]. Given that authorship misconduct may obfuscate from inferring individual contributions, wrongly assigned co-authorship can distort individual credit.

In a 2005 study, Martinson, Anderson and de Vries [ 18 ] found that 10% of the researchers they surveyed had assigned authorship inadequately at least once in their career. Across disciplines, scientists perceive authorship misconduct to be ten times more likely to happen than data fabrication or falsification [ 19 ]. While individual instances of authorship misconduct are less damaging to science than transgressions such as data fabrication or falsification, this type of misconduct seems to be much more widespread, and it does have consequences: ghost authorship and honorary authorship distort citation and publication counts, which, as noted above, are among the primary metrics of academic productivity [ 20 ].

Therefore, it is not surprising that to prevent adulterations of academic rankings, many highly ranked journals, especially in the natural and life sciences, now require so-called contribution disclosures in which each contributor discloses his or her specific contribution to the paper [ 21 , 22 ]. In 2018, Elsevier, a top publisher of social scientific research [ 23 ], adopted guidelines to encourage [ 24 ] authors to employ the “CRediT” system [ 25 ] for contribution disclosures. CRediT, which stands for Contributor Roles Taxonomy, is a system that breaks down the various roles a contributor can play in writing a paper; contributors can be listed, then, according to the precise roles they played, including conceptualization, methodology, software, writing, reviewing and editing. In turn, some social scientific journals have, begun to encourage authors to submit statements on what role each author played in the composition of a submitted article, but, unlike the journals in the natural and life sciences, they do not require these statements [ 26 – 28 ]. In addition, the ethics guidelines of the largest social science research societies do not even mention contribution disclosures [ 29 – 32 ].

The lack of mandatory authorship contribution statements in the social sciences leads to our research question: How prevalent are ghost authorship and honorary authorship in the social sciences? To address this question, we provide clear and comprehensive facts on the prevalence, distribution, and motivational factors of ghost and honorary authorship in the social sciences.

To adequately assess publication counts and to attribute citation counts to individual authors, it is important to recognize contributions made in team-authored publications. Yet the prevailing definitions of authorship are broad and imprecise because of the wide variety of academic fields they need to apply to [ 33 ]. As a case in point, the prevailing modus operandi would identify scholars as authors if they made “substantial contributions” [ 34 ] to the publication. Admittedly, this definition of authorship is vague and leaves many degrees of freedom for the scholars involved. Consequently, there is a wide discrepancy between what authors should ideally attribute and what authors do attribute.

In the social sciences, this discrepancy is further exemplified by the authorship definitions of large societies whose codes of ethics or conduct state that individuals who contributed substantially to a publication should receive authorship [ 29 – 31 ]. Regrettably, the definition of a substantial contribution remains unclear in those guidelines. To solve this issue, editorial policies at an increasing number of prominent interdisciplinary journals that also publish social science articles have begun to implement more specific guidance on who should receive authorship and who should not. These guidelines are either based on [ 35 , 36 ], or very similar to [ 37 , 38 ], the authorship criteria defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) [ 39 ] (the authorship guidelines of Nature [ 37 ] and PNAS [ 38 ] are more relaxed as they only require responsibility for submission and one other task). According to the ICMJE, “Authorship credit should be based only on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; [AND] 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND 3) final approval of the version to be published” [ 39 ]. The ICMJE revised its criteria in 2013, adding the “agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved” [ 40 ] as a fourth criterion. Every researcher fulfilling all four requirements is not only eligible for but must receive authorship [ 40 ]. It is not only interdisciplinary journals that refer to the ICMJE for details on authorship: the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a multidisciplinary advisory body on ethical issues to which several large academic institutions, journals, and societies subscribe, advises its members to employ the ICMJE authorship standards as well [ 41 ]. This highlights the relevance of the ICMJE authorship criteria in the social sciences. Consequently, we employ these criteria as the benchmark definition in our empirical analysis.

Ghost authorship

Having established the definition of authorship based on the ICMJE criteria, we can elaborate on what constitutes authorship misconduct. The first type we will consider is ghost authorship. A ghost author contributes to a research paper, but, willingly or unwillingly, is not named as an author [ 42 ]. Ghost authorship shares with plagiarism the misattribution of intellectual work [ 43 ]. Yet, in plagiarism, the originators are usually not aware of someone else stealing their ideas.

Existing research provides three general explanations for the presence and prevalence of ghost authorship. First, pressure from co-authors, can lead to researchers declining or being declined authorship. The rising usage of fractional counts in assessing scholars’ productivity rs constitutes a potential reason for this because this motivates researchers to include as few authors as possible to maximize their own publication counts [ 44 ]. In such a case, perhaps the ghostwriter is a subordinate of one of the authors, with little power in the relationship [ 45 ]. Second, scientists may voluntarily decline author credits because they perceive the findings in the research as controversial, dubious, or weak; perhaps they fear that the publication of the paper may have negative consequences on their future career [ 46 , 47 ]. Third, researchers may evade authorship to disguise potential conflicts of interest. For example, a freelancer sponsored by a pharmaceutical company may approach life scientists with a biased bundle of articles and ask them to write a research paper based on it [ 48 ], hoping the paper will promote the official approval, and/or boost the sales, of a drug. As the freelancers do not receive authorship (and thus are ghost authors), the monetary commitment of the firm stays secret [ 49 ].

Honorary authorship

In contrast to leaving out contributors in published work, authorship misconduct may also result from adding individuals to publications that they have contributed to either insubstantially or not at all. This behavior is called honorary authorship [ 50 ], gift authorship, or guest authorship [ 51 ]. It is beneficial to those receiving it because they can get the credit for the publications without exerting the effort and time needed to conduct research and write articles. As with ghost authorship, pressure and power dynamics explain some of the occurrences of honorary authorship [ 52 ]: for example, senior scientists may demand authorship from their subordinates in return for employing them, from their Ph.D. students in return for supervising them, or to either in return for providing funding [ 53 , 54 ]. In other cases, the original authors voluntarily include honorary authors. The inclusion of a well-known researcher into the author list increases the publication chances, especially with single-blind review processes and for high-impact journals [ 55 ]. A famous co-author often boosts citations, too, which is beneficial to all authors [ 56 ]. Toward these ends, authors might ask well-known experts to co-author their papers without having participated in the research or writing processes [ 51 ]. A third type of honorary authorship happens when researchers engage in reciprocal relationships. The general increase in co-authored papers enables researchers to trade co-authorship: a scientist adds only a small, non-authorship-worthy contribution to a research project but still receives author credit; the original author also receives reciprocal co-authorship when the honorary author publishes his or her next paper. This behavior may be especially common within chairs or research groups, where reciprocal proofreading might lead to honorary authorship [ 57 ].

Research questions

In the following, we aim to investigate to what extent these findings may generalize across disciplinary boundaries. We, therefore, extend prior work by examining authorship assignments in a field where journals only recently started encouraging scholars to disclose their contributions, where the number of authors on average is manageable and where there is (to the best of our knowledge) limited prior work on honorary and ghost authorship: the social sciences.

We believe this examination to be valuable as the results from the life and natural sciences may provide little guidance for the social sciences due to the many contextual differences in which publishing takes place. For example, the average acceptance rates of papers submitted to the respective field journals are quite different. In the social sciences, journals publish only around 25% of all submissions [ 58 ]. In nature and life sciences, journals publish approximately 40 to 50% of all submissions [ 59 ]. In the following, we study the prevalence of authorship misconduct using a large-scale survey of social science researchers.

Subsequently, we conduct exploratory research on ghost and honorary authorship using various possible determinants of authorship misassignment. We look at job positions because supervisor-subordinate collaborations seem susceptible to authorship misconduct [ 60 – 63 ]. We also look at time spent in academia, as it relates to the specific tasks that researchers take on [ 64 ] and thus might relate to authors’ eligibility according to the ICMJE criteria. (On the subject of tasks, it is worth noting that a recent study surveying “scientists who publish a paper every five days” [ 65 ]–which equals 72 or more published papers per year–showed that more than 70% of the respondents did not conduct at least one of the three required tasks of the ICMJE authorship criteria–excluding accountability–in at least every fourth paper.) In addition, we take into account researchers’ gender. Female researchers are arguably among the most vulnerable, as credit often tends to go primarily to their male colleagues. This tendency is known as the Matilda effect, named for the suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who wrote about how women have been denied credit for their achievements throughout history [ 66 ]. Finally, we look at culture, as it, too, may influence authorship assignments. Salita [ 67 ] discussed the possibility that cultural differences might induce perceptions of authorship that could deviate from the ICMJE criteria.

We thus ask the question of what authors are more likely to confirm ghost or honorary authorship in their published team-authored work. In studying the determinants of these types of misconduct, we provide crucial information that can be used by university officials, journal editors, publishers, et cetera, to implement effective countermeasures.

Materials and methods

Distribution.

To address our research question, we draw on a large-scale survey of social scientists. We designed the survey in spring 2018 using the online survey tool Qualtrics. In May 2018, we asked colleagues for feedback. After incorporating their feedback, we conducted a test run by sending the survey link to 275 scholars who had presented at least one paper at the 2018 European Accounting Association Annual Congress. Data and feedback from the test run showed no need to adapt the questionnaire further. Therefore, the data gathered in the pilot phase is included in the analysis. We did not obtain approval for the survey from an institutional review board (IRB) as the survey was conducted at a point in time where both authors were employed at the RWTH Aachen University. At the RWTH Aachen University, only life science and psychological experimental studies go to the independent ethics committee. The authors contacted the independent ethics committee of the RWTH Aachen University with a request to review the study. Yet the ethics committee replied that they do not provide ethics oversight for empirical social scientific studies. In fact, neither the RWTH Aachen University, nor German state or federal agencies require or offer ethics oversight for empirical research in the social sciences.

To ensure broad dissemination of the questionnaire among researchers from various fields of research in the social sciences, we selected corresponding authors of published articles in well-known journals as well as of papers presented at conferences organized by large field-specific research societies between January 2007 and June 2018. S8 Table includes a list of the societies and journals. After deleting duplicates, we had a total of 126,480 unique email addresses. A random selection of half of these addresses led to an initial sample of 63,240. These scholars received an email containing a brief explanation of the purpose of the study and a Qualtrics URL link to the questionnaire in late August and early September 2018. The link to the survey was the same for everyone to ensure the anonymity of respondents. We ruled out multiple responses by the same individual through IP address restrictions. After sending out the survey, 15,573 emails automatically bounced back due to the email addresses being no longer in use. The contacted sample, therefore, contains 47,697 valid recipients.

The dissemination of the survey resulted in 2,817 responses. This constitutes 4.45% of all contacted email addresses and 5.91% of all valid e-mail address. These rates are comparable to other recently conducted non-incentivized online surveys among scientists investigating academic misconduct [ 68 , 69 ]. Moreover, the demographic characteristics of our sample (available in S1 and S2 Tables) are comparable to the summarized database of more than 30 million Zippia.com profiles affiliated as social scientists [ 70 ]. For example, the share of women is 33.2% in our study and 37.2% in Zippia.com [ 70 ]. Of those who completed the survey, 2,223 were social scientists. We then deleted one respondent with nonsensical answers who claimed to have been working in academia for 100 years despite being only 67 years old. Therefore, our original sample consists of 2,222 respondents. This corresponds to a response rate of 3.51% among all e-mail addresses and 4.66% among valid email addresses. Our drop out rates are comparable to existing research on academic misconduct [ 71 ]. Nevertheless, we investigate whether these dropouts induced potential sample selection bias in the robustness checks. However, the samples used for the following analyses differ because some conference attendees had not yet published in journals and some respondents selected “N/A” for one or more responses. Respondents who had not published a journal paper did not receive the questions on their last published paper but were still able to respond to two vignettes in the last section that described projects and asked respondents to assign authorship to the researchers involved. Respondents stating that their last published paper did not include any non-author contributors were excluded when comparing the actual and perceived rate of ghost authors in model 5 of Table 1 because of divide by zero errors.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.t001

Survey design

The survey consists of three parts. In the first section, respondents answered questions about their demographic and job characteristics. The second part of the survey asked about the distribution of authorship and contributor acknowledgments in the latest published paper that names the respondents as authors. The third section covered two vignettes, as noted above, which described research projects and asked respondents to assign authorship to the researchers involved.

Prevalence of authorship misconduct.

To elicit the extent of ghost and honorary authorship, we asked respondents regarding the number of authors and the number of other people, excluding peer reviewers, who had contributed to their last published paper. Following Mowatt et al. [ 72 ], we asked respondents to specify for each of the authors and contributors (or for the top five, where there were more than five authors or contributors) whether that person participated in creating the research design , searching for literature , analyzing the literature , collecting and/or preparing data , describing the results , writing up the paper , reviewing and commenting on the written paper and approving the final version of the paper . According to the ICMJE authorship criteria, only a person approving the final version of the paper , writing up the paper , and/or reviewing and commenting on the written paper and engaged in at least one of the other tasks mentioned should receive authorship (for the sake of simplicity and comparability with existing research, we refer to the original three ICMJE authorship criteria without the recently added criterion of accountability throughout the article) [ 39 ]. Based on these criteria, we identified as ghost authors those scholars who fulfill the ICMJE requirements but were not listed as authors, and as honorary authors those who do not fulfill the ICMJE requirements but were listed as authors. Furthermore, respondents were asked to indicate on a scale from 0 (disagree) to 100 (agree) whether they agree that for their last published paper, all researchers who made significant contributions were named as authors. We employed this question as an indicator of respondents’ perceptions of the possible presence of ghost authors. The last question in the second part of the survey asked respondents to indicate on a scale from 0 (disagree) to 100 (agree) that for their last published paper, researchers received authorship only if they participated actively in the creation process. In this way, survey recipients stated their perceptions of the possible presence of honorary authors.

Determinants of authorship misconduct.

In addition to determining the prevalence of authorship misconduct, we also aim to provide exploratory evidence regarding potential determinants of authorship misconduct. As discussed in the introduction, there are a wide variety of potential determinants of authorship misconduct. The questionnaire, therefore, included demographic questions on gender, age, and geographical region. Moreover, we asked respondents to indicate their primary research field, their job position, and how long they had worked in academia. In addition, we asked about respondents’ productivity, measured by the number of articles they had published in the three years leading up to the date of the survey, and their level of academic engagement, measured by whether they held a position in an editorial board as well as the number of reviews they had written in the year leading up to the survey date.

Assignment of ghost and honorary authorship.

The assignment of ghost and honorary authorship in two vignettes was intended to help us further investigate the social scientists’ conceptions and misconceptions about authorship. We developed the following two hypothetical scenarios capturing different authorship team compositions that were involved in the development of research papers. Ideas for these vignettes were derived from [ 61 – 63 ], though our research focus and context differs from these studies. Respondents read each vignette and afterward had to decide whether to award authorship to each individual mentioned in the vignettes.

The first vignette described a collaboration between a postdoc and a professor where both contributed to a similar extent towards the publication, while a student assistant helped in the data collection process. According to the ICMJE authorship criteria, the professor and the postdoc should receive authorship, while the student assistant should not.

For the second vignette, Qualtrics randomly split the respondents into two groups. Respondents in Group A assessed a postdoc/professor collaboration while respondents in Group B assessed a professor/professor collaboration, again with a student assistant helping in the data collection. For both groups, the researcher mentioned first in the second vignette exerted substantially higher efforts than the researcher mentioned second, who reached the minimum threshold of the ICMJE authorship criteria by participating in the conception, reviewing, and final approval. The vignettes differ only in the type of collaboration. In neither case should an author credit go to the student assistant.

As researchers’ workloads are the same in the first vignette, the comparison between the randomly assigned groups should not result in differences. Yet the workloads differ between the first and second vignette, resulting in possible variations in authorship assignments between the vignettes.

If, however, we additionally observe differences between the groups in the second vignette, these would be attributable to the perception of rank differences between postdoc/professor and professor/professor collaborations. Thus, we can elicit authorship judgments by the respondents as well as whether these judgments are affected by subjective perceptions about the roles and academic positions of the involved researchers.

Statistical analysis

We conducted the entire data analysis using Stata 16. For the analyses of authorship assignments in respondents’ last published papers, our first set of dependent variables indicates whether the author list of a paper suffers from Ghost Authorship and/or Honorary Authorship . Our second set of dependent variables employs the exact number of Ghost Authors and Honorary Authors per paper. Our third set includes the indications of the extent of Perceived Ghost Authors and Perceived Honorary Authors in respondents’ last published papers. For the analyses of the vignettes, our binary dependent variables employ respondents’ authorship assignments by each individual respondent.

We employ different empirical estimation strategies for each set of dependent variables. We apply logistic regressions for the dichotomous variables of Ghost Authorship and Honorary Authorship . For Ghost Authors and Honorary Authors , we employ negative binomial regressions due to the overdispersion of the count variables. We utilize Poisson regressions for the equidispersed perception-based dependent variables of Perceived Ghost Authorship and Perceived Honorary Authorship . Last, we employ logistic regression again for the authorship assignments associated with the vignettes.

Actual prevalence of authorship misconduct

Based on the ICMJE authorship criteria, out of 1,878 papers with full data on the authorship tasks, one ghost author participated in the creation of 43 (2.29%) papers and two or more ghost authors participated in the creation of 21 (1.12%) papers ( Fig 1A ). Moreover, regardless of the definition of authorship, we can clearly identify 34 ghost authors who have contributed to all tasks of a research project but did not receive authorship. Honorary authorship, as defined by the ICMJE requirements, occurs much more frequently, with 418 papers (22.22%) containing one honorary author, 234 papers (12.44%) containing two honorary authors, 107 papers (5.69%) containing three honorary authors, and 57 (3.03%) containing four or more honorary authors ( Fig 1B ). In addition, regardless of the definition of authorship, we can clearly identify 134 honorary authors who did not contribute at all to a research project on which they were named as authors.

Rates of ghost (A) and honorary (B) authorship. N. of obs. are 1,878 for (A) and 1,881 for (B).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.g001

We compare the rate of ghost authors that we identified based on the ICMJE guidelines to the degree that respondents believed that authorship was inappropriately withheld from one or more contributors. Fig 2A show that social scientists perceive ghost authorship to be more prevalent than it is: the perceived rate of ghost authorship (light blue) exceeds the identified rate of ghost authorship (dark blue). The difference in the means (4.65% for actual and 13.09% for perceived) is significant according to a two-sided t-test (t = -8.0874; df = 812; p<0.00).

Shares of the identified rate of ghost authors and perceived rate of ghost authors (A) as well as the shares identified rate of honorary authors and perceived rate of honorary authors (B). N. of obs. are 813 for (A) (because we only can assess the rate of ghost authors among the papers including at least one non-author contributor) and 1,842 for (B).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.g002

Fig 2B compares the rate of identified honorary authors in each paper to respondents’ assessments of the rate of honorary authors in their last published paper. The difference between the identified (dark blue) and perceived (light blue) occurrences is not as stark as for the perception of ghost authorship (the mean of actual is 23.86% and the mean of perceived is 17.26%). Nevertheless, using a two-sided t-test, we find that the perceived rate of honorary authors is, on average, significantly lower than the identified rate of honorary authors (t = 7.5946; df = 1841; p<0.00).

Potential antecedents to authorship misassignment

To identify the reasons for the mismatches between scholars’ perceptions of the prevalence of authorship issues and the actual occurrence of these issues, we investigate their antecedents and correlates. Table 1 depicts the regression results using a host of explanatory variables. Models 1 and 2 report the results from a logistic regression using a binary dependent variable that takes on the value of one if the researchers’ last papers include at least one ghost author (1) or honorary author (2) based on the ICMJE’s definition of authorship. Models 3 and 4 report the results from a negative binomial regression employing the number of ghost and honorary authors in each paper as dependent variables.

The results show that women do not exhibit more ghost authorship in their papers than men. Yet while the positive coefficient pointing towards women facing honorary authorship more often in their papers is not significant at the conventional p < 0.05 level, this effect is marginally significant at p < 0.1 ( S5 Table ). Furthermore, we find strong effects that scholars in Anglophone and Continental European countries report fewer ghost and honorary authors than scholars from other world regions. Respondents who are Ph.D. students indicate 51.3% more occurrences of honorary authorship and 127% more occurrences of ghost authorship in their last published paper. In contrast, respondents who are professors indicate fewer occurrences of honorary authors but do not differ significantly from the baseline category of junior faculty members regarding ghost authorship. The more papers a scholar has published in the last three years, the more honorary authors he or she reports, though the coefficients are equally small. Concerning differences across research fields, we find that scholars in economics, finance, and political science are about 40% less likely to report the presence of honorary authors in their last published paper than are members of the baseline group of interdisciplinary social scientists. By contrast, psychologists report even more instances of honorary authors in their published papers than interdisciplinary social scientists do.

Models 5 and 6 depict respondents’ perceived assessments of the rates of ghost and honorary authors in their last published paper as the dependent variables. The results show that higher the identified rates of ghost and honorary authors according to the ICMJE criteria are, the higher also the respondents’ perceived the occurrences of these forms of authorship misconduct. Yet the effect for ghost authors is not significant at the conventional p < 0.05 level but only marginally significant at p < 0.1. Nevertheless, the results further attest to the discrepancy between the perception of authorship misconduct and its actual occurrence due to the relatively low explanatory power (as measured in Pseudo-R 2 ) of the regressions.

Hypothetical assignments of authorship

The results on the prevalence and the perception of authorship misconduct revealed some preliminary evidence that the survey respondents seem to be applying an authorship definition that is fairly wide and does not adhere to a common point of reference such as the ICMJE definition. However, it is unclear whether the occurrences of these authorship issues derive from a lack of knowledge of common authorship criteria or from other considerations (whether conscious or unconscious) not mentioned in the survey questions.

To explore the two explanations further, we randomly assigned respondents into two groups and presented them with two vignettes. Table 2 depicts respondents’ authorship assignments for these two hypothetical scenarios.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.t002

The first vignette lists the same scenario for both groups: A professor and a postdoc collaboratively write a paper and a student assistant supports the data collection. By design, the answers concerning who should be listed as an author between the two groups should not differ. The results indicate that the answers within the groups are nearly identical and the respondents similarly assign authorship. Almost all respondents (917 in Group A and 923 in Group B) award authorship to the professor and the postdoc, in concordance with the ICMJE authorship definition. Yet a substantial number of scholars (284 in the first group and 292 in the second group) deviate from the ICMJE criteria by awarding author credits to the student assistant who did not participate in the writing, revision, or submission process. This finding corroborates the prior conjecture that social scientists appear to have a broader conception of authorship.

Importantly, Models 1, 2, and 3 in Table 3 show that the authorship assessments do not differ significantly between the groups when we control for demographic and job-related factors, as the coefficient of Group is insignificant. This helps to establish a baseline behavior for the subsequent analysis when each group judges slightly different scenarios to explore the misconception of authorship criteria among social scientists in more detail.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.t003

In the second vignette, the assignment of authorship to the primary researcher (a postdoc for Group A and a professor for Group B), who takes over most of the tasks, differs only very slightly in comparison to the assignment of authorship in the first vignette. 950 respondents in Group A and 963 respondents in Group B assign authorship to the primary researcher. These assignments concur with the ICMJE authorship criteria. Yet respondents in both groups award authorship less often to the second researcher (a professor) who only performs the minimum number of tasks (revising the research design, revising the paper, and approving the submission of the paper) that would fulfill the ICMJE authorship criteria. In Group A, 607 respondents assign authorship to the professor. In Group B, 700 respondents assign authorship to the professor. Again, the responses deviate substantially from common conventions of authorship. More importantly, however, they even tend to withhold authorship. Differences between the groups remain highly significant even when controlling for various demographic and job-related factors. Model 5 in Table 3 shows that respondents in Group B were 42.9% more likely to award authorship to the second researcher.

Summing up, we find differences in the authorship assignment practices not only between the two vignettes but also across the two groups. The respondents less often assign authorship to the second-mentioned researcher if the primary researcher was a postdoc rather than a professor.

Robustness of results

We conduct several robustness and endogeneity checks. First, while we are unfortunately not able to conduct a non-respondent analysis due to the preservation of respondents’ anonymity, we analyzed the levels at which respondents disengaged from the survey. We compare the characteristics of those respondents that disengaged from the survey after filling out the insensitive questions on demographic, job and academic positions to the sample respondents. S8 and S9 Tables show the descriptive statistics as well as the results from a Wilcoxon rank sum test (we use this non-parametric test because there are 137 respondents who solely answered the insensitive questions). There exist only two significant differences: Those who only answered to the insensitive questions had on average more co-authors as well as more contributors on their last published paper. This points out that respondents most likely disengaged from the survey because the survey constituted too much work for them but not because of the existence of sensitive questions. On the page following the insensitive questions, respondents had to indicate all of their co-authors’ and contributors’ participation for each task. Consequently, the second stage of the survey was more extensive for participants with more co-authors and/or contributors, thus leading to them quitting more often. However, this deviation does not seem to heavily impact the composition of our sample because our sample average of 2.83 authors per paper ( S3 Table ) lies within the social scientific field averages [ 73 ].

First, we run all models with robust standard errors. The levels of significance remain invariant. Second, we estimate all models using OLS regressions and calculate variance inflation factors (VIFs) to assess whether our models suffer from multicollinearity. All VIFs are below the conservative threshold of 5 [ 74 ] and thus we have no reason to believe that our models suffer from multicollinearity. Third, we apply firthlogit, a special form of a logistic regression that considers rare events, to correct for the relatively low number of 64 ghost authorship observations [ 75 ]. The results remain invariant. Fourth, the average team size differs across research fields [ 76 ]. Therefore, we estimate the same regressions with the percentages of honorary and ghost authors in the supplementary material. The only difference is that psychologists no longer report a higher rate of honorary authors anymore. Fifth, we run all analyses including only respondents of papers with a maximum of five authors and contributors to avoid any issues arising from the approximations of respondents stating that their last papers included more than five authors/contributors. The significance levels and implications do not differ from the findings above. Sixth, to detect potential unobserved heterogeneity within the groups, we create interaction terms with the product of Group and all exploratory variables for Models 4 and 5 in Table 3 and again run logistic regressions. The results are available in S7 Table . The coefficients of Group change only slightly, and the significance levels remain invariant. Last, Model 5 in Table 1 might suffer from sample selection, since honorary authorship increases the number of authors and lowers the number of contributors. The inclusion of only papers with at least one contributor in the analysis of the relationship between the perception and the occurrence of ghost authors may, therefore, suffer from endogeneity. To investigate this issue, we employ a Heckman two-step regression by applying Honorary Authorship as the selection variable. This regression returns an insignificant inverse Mills ratio. Therefore, our results do not suffer from sample selection bias [ 77 ].

We analyzed the prevalence of ghost and honorary authorship in the social sciences. We find that many researchers apply very broad authorship criteria that do not accord with the criteria laid out by the ICMJE. This is remarkable, as many social scientific societies subscribe to institutional arrangements such as COPE (which attributes authorship based on ICMJE guidelines) [ 41 ]. Nevertheless, the results are in line with prior work that indicated deviations from the ICMJE standards within the life sciences [ 19 , 46 ]. Interestingly, the social scientists in our study report more honorary authorship but less ghost authorship than life scientists [ 49 , 78 ], using ICMJE criteria as the point of reference.

We also investigated how the misattribution of authorship comes about. By and large, our results show that researchers tend to award authorship more broadly to junior scholars and at the same time may withhold authorship from senior scholars if those are engaged in collaborations with junior scholars. Many social scientists in the sample we studied believe that more of their non-author collaborators should receive authorship despite the fact that many of them do not fulfill the ICMJE standards. We thus find a general pattern that scholars tend to be more generous when it comes to assigning authorship. This may imply that social scientists have their own authorship criteria in mind that do not necessarily match commonly applied criteria such as those laid out by ICMJE. Misattributions of authorship can go both ways: the results from the second vignette show that a substantial number of respondents are more restrictive and even tend to withhold authorship from senior researchers who work with junior scholars. As noted above, in the second vignette, we presented a scenario where both scholars should receive authorship following the ICMJE criteria, despite unequal inputs.

In sum, our vignettes document that the prevalence of ghost and honorary authorship is to a large extent affected by the fact that many participants did not adhere to common authorship criteria. Even more so, the discrepancy in authorship attribution could be exacerbated by fairness expectations and benevolent discrimination.

We show that some social scientists withhold authorship from individuals if they collaborate with others who put more effort into a research project. Fairness expectations provide a plausible explanation for this finding: Scholars perceive it as unfair to award authorship to all researchers if the distribution of efforts is highly uneven. After all, even the best social scientists are still human beings and thus learn fairness expectations and altruism from early childhood on [ 79 ].

Benevolent discrimination “is a subtle and structural form of discrimination that is difficult to see for those performing it, because it frames their action as positive, in solidarity with the (inferior) other who is helped, and within a hierarchical order that is taken for granted” [ 80 ]. Following this reasoning, it appears that researchers in our sample award authorship more generously to undeserving student assistants and withhold authorship from professors if they collaborate with junior scholars without sharing the work equally.

Moreover, the results from the empirical study exhibit suggestive evidence that benevolent discrimination appears not only in the hypothetical assignments but also in actual authorship assignments. Ph.D. students are much more likely than faculty members to have encountered cases of honorary authorship. Even the ethics policies from large social scientific societies like the Academy of Management [ 29 ], the American Sociological Association [ 30 ], and the American Psychological Association [ 31 ] enforce benevolent discrimination by requiring Ph.D. students to become the first author when published articles are based on their dissertation without considering the distributions of the contributions in such research projects.

As it concerns the determinants of authorship misattributions, our results report a clear gender difference. Women are more likely to report that honorary authors were included in their papers. While our results do not speak in favor of discriminatory effects here, they highlight an area for future inquiries to study gender inequalities in the social sciences [ 66 ].

Hierarchical pressure might explain some regional differences in the prevalence of ghost and honorary authorship. Scholars living in Anglophone and Central European countries report that authorship misconduct is less prevalent in their research. Work by researchers residing in Asia, by contrast, more often includes ghost and honorary authors. The cultural background of these scientists coming from countries with generally higher levels of power distance [ 81 ] might explain this phenomenon, as department or faculty heads may receive authorship even without having read the paper [ 67 , 82 ].

Our research also adds an observation to the literature on highly prolific authors. Awarding authorship to department or faculty heads might also explain why respondents who had published more papers also more often had honorary authors in their papers and assigned honorary authorship more often in the vignettes. More generous authorship assignments may result in higher publication counts [ 65 , 83 ].

Last, we show that the prevalence of ghost and honorary authorship varies across research fields. Different author ordering conventions might explain this. Economics, finance, and political science usually rank authors alphabetically [ 84 , 85 ] while other fields, such as psychology, order by contribution. Consequently, in the former fields, awarding authorship to yet another author means that the main author(s) may disappear into the “et al.” rubric for future citations. For the latter fields, there are more incentives to include individuals in charge of financing the research project (e.g. the department head) as the last author, for example, even if they had not participated in the research process [ 86 ]. Arguably, ordering by contributions rather than alphabetically increases the chances of honorary authorship assignments.

Implications

Our results highlight a high prevalence of ghost and honorary authorship and a broad deviation in authorship assignments from such as the commonly employed ICMJE criteria. These findings highlight the necessity to introduce authorship criteria that are better tailored to the needs, preferences, and perceptions of social scientists. Hence, we call upon large research societies such as the Academy of Management, the American Economic Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association, as well as on the most prominent publishers such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Springer [ 23 ], to revise their existing guidelines on authorship. The revision should focus on establishing clear, precise, and specific criteria that should be also discussed and taught at their annual meetings. This would increase knowledge and awareness of authorship and would ease the job of journal editors as they could rely on accurate guidelines when making attributions of authorship. In turn, these attributions would lead to fairer comparisons of authors for career decisions. Though, one might account for more multi-dimensional criteria in these comparisons anyhow. As a case in point, Moher et al. [ 87 ] highlighted several methods of assessing scientific performance including creativity, openness, transparency, and addressing and solving societal problems that go beyond pure publication counts.

The differences in authorship attributions in our study highlight the need to rethink contribution disclosures. Contribution disclosures allow insights into the workload distributions among author teams. Even if researchers’ understanding of authorship varies, contribution disclosures would give an outside observer a better chance to assess who did what regarding a specific publication. This would not rule out misconduct, of course, but it would make it much harder to add individuals who did not contribute at all. If journals require contribution statements from each author and contributor, scholars will face high coordination efforts to submit factually wrong but congruent contribution disclosure statements. Hence, mandatory contribution disclosure statements raise the barrier for submitting falsified author lists. The introduction of contribution disclosures has already reduced instances of honorary authorship in the life sciences [ 33 ]. Moreover, contribution disclosures might also reduce instances of benevolent discrimination, as uneven divisions of efforts are accounted for in the contribution statements.

Of course, the introduction of contribution disclosures is not a panacea. It requires editors and authors to be aware of authorship criteria and the consequences of potential misconduct. To ensure this, we recommend that academic societies, research institutions, and publishers establish social scientific authorship criteria in their guidelines and provide tutorials and workshops on authorship.

Limitations and future research

Every research has to be understood and interpreted in light of its limitations. Perhaps the greatest limitation of this study is that existing authorship criteria in the social sciences are overly vague, leaving researchers with very little guidance. In our work, we applied the ICMJE authorship criteria as a common point of reference to better understand authorship assignments in the social sciences. Although universities and societies should apply these criteria (through associating with COPE, for example), social scientists’ perceptions about what constitutes authorship clearly differ from the ICMJE criteria. We attribute this among others to inherent differences in the research and authorship attribution processes of social and life sciences [ 21 ]. Consequently, though we find that ghost and honorary authorship are common, some social sciences researchers might argue that this does not represent misconduct but rather is reflective of common authorship practices in the social sciences.

Also, the results of our study may not necessarily generalize. Our findings reported a relatively low number of identified ghost authors. While the application of firthlogit indicates that the findings are robust and valid, the small number of observations might be obfuscating further effects. The quantitative survey contained sensitive questions that, despite the fact that respondents were assured of anonymity, could lead to the understatement of actual wrongdoings–a common problem in research on questionable research practices and academic misconduct [ 68 ]. For this reason, the actual prevalence of ghost and honorary might be higher than what our study uncovered, especially when using survey designs that explicitly deal with sensitive items.

Also, the unequal distribution of researchers among geographical regions and research fields might reduce the applicability of our results. Some fields might exhibit higher or lower levels of ghost and honorary authorship. More field-specific studies could determine the prevalence more precisely.

Several fruitful areas for future research can be derived from this study. First, future research could discuss whether common authorship practices in the social sciences like automatically assigning Ph.D. students first authorship should be continued or replaced by more merit-based mechanisms. Second, comparing research-field-specific authorship criteria could explain why scholars from different disciplines vary in their authorship assessments. Third, closely examining the authorship assignments of extremely prolific social science scholars could clear up doubts on whether they really exhibit higher productivity levels or receive honorary authorship more often. Fourth, a qualitative study surveying researchers who experienced ghost and/or honorary authorship could provide a better understanding of the motivations and consequences of authorship misattribution. Last, the use of anonymity-preserving survey measures such as item-sum techniques [ 88 ] could increase respondents’ perceived anonymity and therefore lead to a more accurate assessment of ghost and honorary authorship.

This study analyzed the prevalence of ghost and honorary authorship in the social sciences. Our results show that social scientists perceive authorship differently than established in the ICMJE criteria and allied organizations that seek to create standard definitions. We find that authorship misconduct, in the form of ghost and honorary authorship, is highly prevalent in the social sciences. We also investigated the correlates of authorship misassignments and found that fairness expectations and benevolent discrimination are prime candidates to explain why and to what extent researchers may either assign authorship too freely or restrict it too much. We discuss potential solutions: The introduction of social scientific authorship criteria by the largest research society, the enforcement of contribution disclosures through journals and publishers, and a shift away from the importance of citation and publication counts in hiring and tenure processes could all alleviate the problem of misattributing authorship and distorting publication records.

Supporting information

S1 table. descriptive statistics for dichotomous variables..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s001

S2 Table. Descriptive statistics for integer variables.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s002

S3 Table. Pairwise correlations coefficients for all employed variables.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s003

S4 Table. Regression results of actual and perceived prevalence of ghost and honorary authorship including confidence intervals.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s004

S5 Table. Regression results of hypothetical authorship assignments in the vignettes including confidence intervals.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s005

S6 Table. Regression results of hypothetical authorship assignments in the vignettes.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s006

S7 Table. Comparison of samples for dummy variables.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s007

S8 Table. Comparison of samples for integer variables.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s008

S9 Table. List of journals and societies included in the data collection.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s009

S1 File. Do-file with Stata code for generating all figures and tables.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s010

S1 Text. The text of the vignettes employed in the study.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267312.s011

Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Department of Business Decisions and Analytics of the University of Vienna, especially Oliver Fabel and Rudolf Vetschera, for their inputs on this paper.

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Publication ethics: Role and responsibility of authors

Shubha singhal.

Department of Pharmacology, Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi, 110 002 India

Bhupinder Singh Kalra

Publication of scientific paper is critical for modern science evolution, and professional advancement. However, it comes with many responsibilities. An author must be aware of good publication practices. While refraining from scientific misconduct or research frauds, authors should adhere to Good Publication Practices (GPP). Publications which draw conclusions from manipulated or fabricated data could prove detrimental to society and health care research. Good science can blossom only when research is conducted and documented with complete honesty and ethics. Unfortunately, publish or perish attitude has led to unethical practices in scientific research and publications. There is need to identify, acknowledge, and generate awareness among junior researchers or postgraduate students to curb scientific misconduct and adopt GPP. This article discusses various unethical publication practices in research. Also, the role and responsibilities of authors have been discussed with the purpose of maintaining the credibility and objectivity of publication.

Introduction

Need to publish.

A scientific paper is an organized description of hypothesis, data, and conclusions, intended to instruct the readers. Research conducted has to be published or documented; otherwise, it is considered not done. Publication of paper is critical for the evolution of modern science, in which the work of one scientist builds upon that of others [ 1 ]. The roots of scholarly, scientific publishing can be traced to 1665, when Henry Oldenburg of the British Royal Society established the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . The aim of the journal was to create a public record of original contribution to knowledge and also to encourage scientists to “speak” directly to others [ 2 ]. Documentation of research work followed by publication helps in the dissemination of observations and findings. This flow of knowledge guides and contributes towards research coalition. Established and budding researchers do get benefited by published literature and consolidates their research.

Publication of research in peer-reviewed journal not only validates the research and boosts confidence of the authors but also gives national and international recognition to an author, department, university, and institution [ 3 ]. Unfortunately, in some establishments, the most compelling reason for publication is to fulfill specific job requirements by employers. It may include promotion to an academic position and improving prospects of success in research grant application. The importance of publication in the career is further emphasized by the adage “Publish or perish,” i.e. publish your research or lose your identity.

Ethics-related organizations and their role

A good research involves many coordinated steps. It starts from hypothesis, selection of appropriate study design, study execution, data collection, analysis, and finally publication. Not only the conduct of the study requires ethics to be adhered to but also the process of publication comes under the purview of ethics. Any publication that reports the results and draws the conclusion from the data which have been manipulated is considered research fraud or scientific misconduct [ 4 ]. Recently, Lancet retracted a study entitled “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis” because the veracity of the data underlying this observational study could not be assured by the study authors [ 5 ].

There are organizations which give recommendations and develop guidelines to assist authors, editors, and reviewers. The purpose is to create and disseminate accurate, clear, reproducible, unbiased research papers. The organizations involved with publication ethics are

• International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE).
• World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

The ICMJE was established in 1978, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, by a group of medical journal editors. ICMJE developed recommendations which are primarily for authors who want to submit their work in ICMJE member journals. These recommendations discuss the role and responsibilities of the authors, contributors, reviewers, and editors. Steps of manuscript preparation, submission, and editorial issues related to publication in medical journals are also discussed and drafted. The uniform requirements for manuscript submitted to biomedical journals, which most of the journals are following were drafted by ICMJE [ 6 ].

The WAME is a nonprofit voluntary association, which was established in 1995 by a group of members of the ICMJE. The goal was to improve editorial standards, promote professionalism in medical editing, and encourage research on the principals and practice of medical editing. The role of WAME is to facilitate worldwide cooperation and communication among editors of peer-reviewed medical journal. Membership in WAME is free and all decision-making editors of peer-reviewed journals are eligible to join. WAME has more than 1830 members representing more than 1000 journals from 92 countries [ 7 ].

The COPE also helps in ethical publication. COPE was founded in 1997 by a small number of UK medical editors as a self-help group to discuss troubling ethical cases in the publication process. It provides paid membership and currently has more than 7000 members in various disciplines from all parts of the world. The purpose of COPE is to find the practical ways to deal with the misconduct cases and to develop codes of conduct for good publication practice. It also generates the funding for the research based on the issues related to publication misconduct [ 8 ].

Process of publication

The scientific publication is a team effort. Transforming the research findings and observations into a published article is an art as well as science, which involves multiple steps. The very first step is the preparation of the manuscript as per the journal’s requirement. The language in which the manuscript has been drafted is important. It should be checked by an expert or native language speaker and the senior authors. Clear and concise language helps editors and reviewers to concentrate on the content. For up-to-date information, recent references should be cited. Final manuscript must be shared with all the authors and it should have approval of all the authors. Copyright transfer form should be signed by all the authors before submitting to the journal. Signing the copyright form brings responsibility.

Submitted manuscripts are first screened by the editors for its suitability, content, novelty, and what it adds to existing knowledge. The subject of research work should be synchronized with the target journal. It should comply with journal’s manuscript drafting guidelines. After the editorial screening, if some technical issues or non-adherence to manuscript guidelines are observed, it is sent back to the author for technical modifications. The peer review process gets initiated after technical modifications are acceptable. It may take a couple of weeks/months.

In light of reviewer’s recommendations, the editor sends the decision letter to the author mentioning the status of the manuscript, i.e. accepted, rejected, or requires revision. In case of revision, author(s) reply in detail to all comments of reviewers and submit to the journal again within stipulated time. After deliberation on replies and revised manuscript submitted, the editor decides for suitability of publication or if it needs to be sent out for review again. These steps get repeated until the manuscript is accepted or rejected. Once it gets accepted, it goes under proof read stage and finally gets published. The author is never in direct communication with the reviewer. He communicates with the Editorial board only. The reviewer should declare conflicts of interest (COI), if any, before reviewing the manuscript. Manuscripts are usually mailed to reviewers without information of the authors and their affiliations; hence, reviewers are blinded.

What is publishable or not publishable?

Writing for publication is an important yet challenging form of knowledge dissemination. Journals like to publish articles that present an exhaustive meaningful research. It should contribute towards the knowledge building and awareness of readers. At the very minimum, a publishable article needs to be original. It should be conducted and drafted with robust methodology and significant findings, well organized, well written, and concise yet clear. It should be drafted with clear explanation of how the article addresses the existing knowledge gap. Conclusion drawn should be relevant to the audience or readers with a comprehensive list of up-to-date references. Papers that are poorly organized, cluttered with unnecessary information, and consist of routine extension of previous reports or fragmentary reports of research results are not accepted for publication. Violation of ethical or legal norms, including plagiarism, duplicates publication lead to immediate rejection of the paper [ 9 ].

Scientific misconduct

Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of scientific research [ 10 ]. Misconduct in the scientific publication process by the authors is detrimental for integrity of the whole system and is considered unethical. Falsification or fabrication of data is the gravest form of scientific misconduct wherein authors either manipulate skewed data to look favorable or generate data where no data exists. Different forms of scientific misconduct are plagiarism or misappropriation of the ideas of others, improprieties of authorship, simultaneous publications, duplicate publications, salami slicing, and non-declaration of COI. Conducting research without informed consent or ethics approval and not maintaining data confidentiality is a form of scientific misconduct. Editors or publication houses do take disciplinary action as per COPE recommendations against scientific misconduct. Authors are blacklisted or banned to submit articles in the respective journal in the future [ 11 ].

Criteria of authorship

Academic life revolves around publications. The publication adds to the credibility of the research and brings fame and recognition. An author is an individual who fulfills enlisted criteria collectively: (1) substantial contributions to conception and design; (2) acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published. Individuals who have provided technical services/translating text/identifying patients for study/supplying material/providing funds/applied statistics/medical writers are not eligible for authorship. However, all those contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgement section [ 12 , 13 ]. Because of the important role of publication in clinical practice and academic setting, the authorship of articles must be honest, reliable, trustworthy, and transparent.

Types of authors

Since authorship is sought after, many unethical practices are also prevalent. Ghost, guest, or gift authors are the examples of such practices. A ghost author is a person who has made a substantial contribution to the research or writing of a manuscript but is not listed as an author. A ghost author might be a direct employee or hired contract employee of pharmaceutical company and hence, listing him as an author amounts to COI [ 14 ]. It is dishonest to omit an author who has made significant contributions. In contrast to ghost author, guest or gift/honorary author is someone who is named as an author, but who did not contribute in a meaningful way to the design, research, analysis, or writing of a paper. Often guest or gift authors are well known and well respected in the field of research. The inclusion of their name in the author list might increase chances of acceptance for publication.

However, sometimes senior investigators may also give honorary authorship to their colleagues for encouraging collaborations and maintaining good working relations or as repayment of favors. Whatever the cause, the gift or guest authorship is an unacceptable practice in publication. The presence of well-known author on the board as a guest author can influence the opinion of clinicians, academicians, and politicians about a particular drug or device. Secondly, due to gift authorship, the person is perceived as being more skilled than his colleague who has not published [ 12 , 13 ]. In multicenter trials, since investigators from different sites have contributed, they qualify for the authorship and all those who qualify for authorship should be listed [ 15 ]. One should always remember that authorship brings responsibility and authors have to be accountable to the data and results which are published.

Authorship issues/disputes

Authorship issues or disputes account for 2% to 11% of all disagreement in the scientific community. The authorship disputes could range from order of authorship, inclusion or exclusion of authors, number of authors etc. Request for addition of authors after submission or even after publication is quite common. In contrast, there are examples where a co-author denies becoming a part of a manuscript, once any scientific misconduct including plagiarism is detected [ 16 ].

The order of authorship should be mutually decided before taking up the study. It has to be a joint decision of all co-authors. In multicenter trials, research group includes large number of researchers. Hence, the corresponding author specifies and registers the group name and clearly identifies the group members who can take credit and responsibility for the work as an author.

ICMJE and other organizations issued the guidelines regarding group authorship and stated that in case of group authorship the byline of the article identifies who is directly responsible for the manuscript, and MEDLINE lists as authors. If the byline includes a group name, MEDLINE will list the names of individual group members who are authors or who are collaborators [ 17 ]. Despite these guidelines, authorship battles for inappropriate attribution of credit are witnessed in this area also.

Usually, the dispute is for the “First author” place because most of the articles are cited by the name of the first author. Conventionally, the extent of involvement decides the order of authorship; for example, the person who has done the majority of the groundwork would be considered eligible for being the first author (junior researcher) and the person who planned and conceived the study would be the last author (supervisor). There is no general consensus in order of authorship, and there are different schools of thoughts [ 16 ]. During submission of revised manuscript, order of authorship should not be altered without any justification. Approval from all authors is warranted in case of revision of order of authorship. It affects the credibility of manuscript too.

How to resolve authorship issues

The best way to prevent disputes in authorship is to generate awareness among research groups about authorship criteria and to develop Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for the conduct and publication of research. COPE guidelines are to be referred in case of authorship or conflicts [ 18 ]. The next best option to prevent disputes is to have open discussion among all the authors involved in multidisciplinary research prior to initiating research, i.e. at the time of protocol drafting. Defining the role and responsibility of each author further reduces the chances of disputes within the research team. Editors do ask for individual contributions of authors in designing manuscript. The journal can blacklist guest or ghost authors [ 12 ].

Plagiarism: do’s and don’ts

The word plagiarism was first used in the English language in the year 1601 by the dramatist Ben Jonson to describe someone who was guilty of theft. Plagiarism is derived from the Latin word “plagiare” which means to “kidnap.” A plagiarist is the person who commits plagiarism [ 19 ]. By definition, plagiarism is the use of previously published work by another author in one’s own manuscript without consent, credit, or acknowledgement. It is the most common form of scientific misconduct [ 4 ]. Plagiarism can be intentional or unintentional. Unintentional plagiarism is usually seen in articles written by students or junior researchers. Lack of awareness and ignorance lead to unintentional plagiarism. Intentional plagiarism happens when an author deliberately copies documented or published work and presents it as his/her own. Both types of plagiarism are unethical and illegal, which can ruin the career and reputation of the writer [ 19 ].

Plagiarism of idea occurs when a plagiarist copies or steals the idea or thought of someone else and presents it as his/her own. Such type of plagiarism is difficult to detect; however, once detected, it is considered serious offense. The example of plagiarism of idea is presenting or documenting an idea of someone else which is being discussed or presented in any conference or seminar without citing proper sources. Plagiarism of text or direct plagiarism, i.e. word to word writing, is when a researcher takes large section of an article from another source and pastes it in his/her own research without providing proper citation. One of the hybrid varieties of plagiarism is Mosaic plagiarism where the author steals the idea, opinion, words, and phrases from different sources and merges words without acknowledging the original author.

Self-plagiarism is the practice of an author using portions of their previous writings on the same topic in their subsequent publications, without specifically citing it formally in quotes. There is no consensus as to whether this is a form of scientific misconduct, or how many of one’s own words one can use before it is truly “plagiarism.” To be on the safer side, authors should cite source or give reference of their previous publications. There are examples in which plagiarism engulfed the entire career of authors and writers and it became the reason of article retraction or rejection [ 20 ].

Culture of publish or perish is one of the important causes of plagiarism. The researcher needs to publish a large number of papers in limited time period to get more opportunities in career and research. In addition, lack of knowledge, laziness, and fear of failure and desire of getting recognition also lead to plagiarism. Many softwares, which can detect plagiarism are available online. It is the responsibility of the author to run their manuscript through software before submitting it to the journal [ 19 , 21 ].

The very first step to prevent plagiarism is the awareness about plagiarism, the consequences, and how to avoid plagiarism. Authors can avoid plagiarism by acknowledging the original source of the idea or word and enclosing them within quotation marks. In case of paraphrasing, where the writer writes the text in his own word, authors must properly cite the original source. Authors must always obtain permission for use of published illustration. Authors should avoid writing multiple separate articles if he can present a large, complex study in a cohesive manner in a single article [ 21 ].

Conflict of interest

Conflict of interest is an attribute which is invisible to the reader or editor, but which may affect or influence his or her judgment or objectivity. Academicians/physicians and researchers often work in collaboration with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to develop a product for the well-being of society. However, there are examples where financial and non-financial ties of researches or physicians with the company have compromised the integrity of research [ 22 ].

Conflict of interest describes the situations where the impartiality of the research may be compromised because the researcher stands to profit in some way from the conclusions they draw [ 23 ]. Examples of potential conflicts of interests that are directly or indirectly related to the research may include research grants from funding agencies, honorarium for speaking at symposium, financial support for educational programs, employment, and multiple affiliations. In addition, non-financial benefits including recognition, career advancement, advocacy for a strongly held position, and support for friends and colleagues can also affect the research work and result biases in the research. These biases, when hidden, can affect clinical decision-making by making interventions appear safer or more effective than they really are [ 24 ].

Disclosure of COI is the basic requirement to prevent attribution-related bias in the research. The ICMJE has produced a common form to disclose any COI and that has to be individually signed by each co-author. It has to be uploaded along with the manuscript files. The intent of the disclosure form is not to prevent authors with a potential COI from publication. It is merely intended that any potential conflict should be declared so that the readers may form their own judgment about the findings and observations. It is for the readers to determine whether the authors outside interest may reflect a possible bias in either the exposition of the conclusions presented [ 25 ]. Authors are supposed to declare COI in the manuscript text too which is meant for readers.

Duplicate publication

Duplicate publication or redundant publication is a publication of a paper that substantially overlaps with one which is already published, without clear, visible reference to the previous publication [ 26 ]. As per copyright law and publication ethics, whatever is available in the journal for reading would be original unless there is a clear statement that the author and editor are intentionally republishing an article. Hence, duplication of publication is the breach in the copyright law and against the ethical conduct. In addition, duplication of publication causes waste of limited resources and also leads to inappropriate weighting of the result of a single study. It was observed that duplicate publications of Ondansetron led to overestimation of its efficacy by 23% in one of the meta-analyses [ 26 , 27 ].

The COPE classifies duplicate publication into major and minor offenses. The major offense is the one where duplicate publication is based on the same data set and findings which are already published. It is also considered if there is evidence that the author tried to hide duplication by changing the title or order of authorship or by not referring previous publication [ 28 ]. Minor or salami slicing is considered segmental publication or part publication of results or reanalysis derived from a single study. Authors do it to increase the number of publications and citations. It is considered unethical and it is taken in a bad taste because for a reader it may cause distortion in the conclusions drawn. Publication of the results of a single study in parts in different journals might lead to over-judgement. Wrong conclusions may be drawn from a study if it is done on a fixed number of subjects but the data are being presented in fragments in different journals.

When an author needs to submit a report that has been already published or closely related to another paper that has been submitted elsewhere, the letter of submission should clearly say so. The authors should declare and provide copies of the related submission to help the editor decide how to handle the submission. Authors who attempt to duplicate publication without such notification can face prompt rejection of the submitted manuscript. If the editor was not aware of the violations and the article has already been published, then the article might warrant retraction with or without the author’s explanation or approval.

Duplicate publication does not prevent the author to disseminate important public health information in case of public health emergency. In fact, ICMJE encourages editors to give priority to authors who have made crucial data publicly available without delay [ 26 ]. Duplicate publications are justified if it is about combined editorials, clinical guidelines, and translation of archives.

Predatory publishing

Predatory publishing is the publication of an article in the journal that lacks the usual feature of editorial oversight, transparent policies, and operating procedure of legitimate peer review journals. Predatory journals exploit the authors by charging the publication fee and deceiving them by providing the false claim about the journal’s impact factor, indexing, and peer review [ 29 ].

Predatory publishing is harmful for both the author and the community. Predatory publishing may tarnish the image of the author. Articles published in predatory journals are usually not appreciated by the subject expert. It can misinform the readers and propagate wrong science because of poor quality control. Sometimes genuine information also gets missed because most of the predatory journals are not indexed in the database, so papers are not easily traceable [ 30 ].

Predatory publishing can be avoided by educating researchers, supervisors, and administrators about fake journals. Authors should also learn how to identify trustworthy journals. If the journal website mentions of indexing, then it is important to cross check the inclusion of the journal in the mentioned databases. For an open-access journal, the inclusion in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) can be checked at the DOAJ website. The journal’s claim of the Journal Citation Report (JCR) impact factor can be verified by its International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) number in the JCR Master list. Another approach to check trustworthy journals is to self-asses the journal through websites like https://thinkchecksubmit.org/ [ 30 ].

Responsibility of author

Authorship is not just a list of names. It is the matter of pride that has to be deserved, earned, and declared [ 15 ]. To maintain the integrity and credibility of medical research and to nourish the trust of public in scientific endeavors, all authors must follow the rules of good scientific publication practice and should stick to the following responsibilities (Table ​ (Table1 1 ):

• Do not fabricate or manipulate the data
• Avoid plagiarism and give proper acknowledgment to other works
• Decide the order of authorship prior to writing the paper to avoid future conflicts
• Declare whether research work has been published or presented before
• Declare COI
• Avoid ghost/gift/guest authorship
• Do not submit the manuscript to more than one journal for simultaneous consideration
• Take approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee before conducting research
• Last but not the least, take direct responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

Role and responsibilities of author

COI conflict of interest, CONSORT Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, ARRIVE Animal research: reporting in vivo experiments, CTRI Clinical Trials Registry - India

Awareness of good publication practices should be generated among novice authors to prevent unethical practices in publication of scientific research. Each institute or department should resort to COPE or ICMJE recommendations for publications and draft their own SOP for authors who are actively involved in research. Unethical practices on the part of the authors or scientific misconduct should be discouraged and addressed by appropriate training and guidance.

Compliance with ethical standards

SS, and BSK declare that they have no conflict of interest.

The authors are solely responsible for the data and the contents of the paper. In no way, the Honorary Editor-in-Chief, Editorial Board Members, the Indian Society of Gastroenterology or the printer/publishers are responsible for the results/findings and content of this article.

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