Determining Authorship On Scientific Papers

Conversely someone who only provides funding for the paper does not deserve to be listed as an author.Criteria to attribute authorship vary among institutions and research groups or sometimes authorship may be attributed without following any criteria at all.

We specifically speculated that addresses at Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and their foreign equivalents could be indicative of a fraudulent manuscript.

However, we found that the use of non-institutional email addresses is too widespread to make it a useful criterion.

As was true of the entire Committee, the study operated independently of the ’s editorial process; the editorial process for manuscripts that were examined was not affected by the pilot study.

Following extensive deliberation, we came up with a list of criteria to screen in the pilot: As an aside – we hope that by identifying some of these criteria, we do not inspire paper mills to start changing their tactics to avoid detection by, for example, writing cover letters.

We concluded that non-institutional email addresses are present in many legitimate manuscripts and institutional email addresses are present in at least some suspected fraudulent manuscripts.

We were also aware that certain criteria (2-5) would be common for early career scientists or trainees.Hvistendahl described a situation where people were selling authorship on manuscripts that were intended to be published in journals listed in Thomson Reuters’ Scientific Citation Index (SCI).The author explains that Chinese students and faculty felt under so much pressure to publish in a SCI journal that a black market arose for “papers-for-sale.” Apparently, agencies in China work with authors of manuscripts that are conditionally accepted (in revision) at SCI journals and academics in need of authorship on such publications.Therefore he or she often receives most of the credit for the published paper but also has primary responsibility if troubles arise.In a large author team, the last author may be the most experienced researcher of the team and the one who guides the research.Usually, the author who is listed first or last will serve as the corresponding author.An “honorary author” refers to someone who is listed as an author for convenience but who does not meet formal authorship criteria.We offer these ideas up to the community, as they appear not to produce false positives and may correctly detect at least some true positives. The productivity and prestige of a research team might be established through their publication rate.Traditionally, “being in the middle” is a less desirable position, as the contribution of co-authors listed in the middle may be considered lesser.The corresponding author communicates with the journal during the publication process and is contacted for further notifications.