Questionable Authorship Practices: Understanding and Addressing the Challenges

Pressures to publish and compete for prestige can give rise to questionable authorship practices that compromise research integrity. These include gift authorship, manipulative affiliations, buying/selling authorship, hyperprolific publishing, and even fictitious authors. Such practices undermine trust in scholarship and can cause undue advantage or harm to researchers’ professional credibility and advancement. This session will survey these practices, examine some underlying causes, and consider approaches to addressing them, such as authorship taxonomies, clear institutional and journal policies, early contributor discussions, and transparent contributor statements.

Presenter: Clarke Iakovakis (Associate Professor, Library)

This session is part of the Promoting Research Excellence series.