Editorial: Further Thoughts on Authorship: Gift Authorship

Excerpt

Authorship is sometimes one of the most vexing ethical issues in publishing scientific articles although not a new concern. Alexander, in 1953, noted the trend in increasing numbers of authors as a result of the evolution from individual researchers to teams [1] and the complexities of establishing who should and who should not be considered an author. (A PubMed search at the time of this writing listed 778 articles with “authorship” in the title, 253 of which had been published in the past 5 years.) Several years ago Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research published an editorial, “Thoughts on Authorship,” describing recent national and international efforts to establish standards for determining authorship [3]. Part of the reason for these standards was the growing numbers of authors on most papers and the corresponding difficulty of determining the contributions of those authors. Clearly any given study and paper involves a finite amount of effort, and the larger the number of authors, the smaller percentage effort on average will be for a given author [4, 5]. However, most studies and reports likely involve substantial efforts from a few individuals with lesser contributions from others; as authors are added, at some point the effort of the additional authors will be vanishingly small or absent. The inclusion of individuals with minimal or no input reflects “loose authorship,” [2], “honorary authorship” [15], or “gift authorship” [6, 8, 11]. Marcia Angell (a former Deputy Editor of New England Journal of Medicine) in her 1983 article, “Editors and Fraud” [2], referred to “loose authorship” as a form of deception. While gift authorship is not new, it appears in the literature as a major concern only in the 1980s, perhaps owing to the continuing rise in numbers of authors and an increased sensitivity to ethical issues in publishing. …