Recommendations for Proactively Addressing Authorship Disputes

In my research days, there was a time when a colleague did not want to be an author on one of our papers. They contributed to the work but disagreed with parts of the draft manuscript. It was an honest disagreement, one that we discussed professionally. I was not offended and could see where they were coming from. Long story short, we agreed they would not be an author on the final submitted paper, and life went on. Sometimes disagreements about authorship cannot be avoided, and many have likely seen it up close. They can be handled thoughtfully and appropriately. But when they are not, they may lead to serious consequences for the people and research involved. Here, we will look at this issue more closely and reflect on how to proactively address them. We tend to see three main ways authorship disputes happen. Sometimes a researcher (usually more junior) feels they should have been included as an author on the submitted manuscript but were not. In other disputes someone is included on a paper, but they never agreed to its content. Then there are disagreements about authorship order. The last situation appears to be more prevalent in biomedicine where the order may be dictated by the amount or nature of someone’s contributions, compared to other fields like economics or mathematics where the author order tends to be alphabetical. Some of these authorship disputes come to our attention as research misconduct or harassment/discrimination allegations. A researcher may claim th...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike anti-harassment publications Research integrity Source Type: funding