Is Authorship Sufficient For Today S Collaborative Research A Call For

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging on many levels. Here we discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to the concept of authorship that may impede the recognition of contributions to a scholarly work. Recent work in the field of authorship shows that shifting to a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. Recent efforts to enable better recognition of contributions to scholarship include the development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems for structuring contributions. We also introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), which provides a simple data model that relates the contributor to research objects via the role that they played, as well as the provenance of the... Finally, requirements for the adoption of a contributorship-based approach are discussed.

Keywords: Attribution; authorship; contributorship; peer review; publication ethics. Communications Medicine volume 5, Article number: 99 (2025) Cite this article An Author Correction to this article was published on 24 April 2025 In this Perspective article, we call for a fairer approach to authorship practice in collaborative biomedical research to promote equity and inclusiveness. Current practice does not adequately recognise all contributors involved in different stages of the work and may exacerbate preexisting inequalities. Here, we discuss some key features of contemporary collaborative research practice that complicate authorship decisions.

These include the project size, complexity of multidisciplinary team involvement and researchers having varying degrees of expertise and experience. We conclude by making some suggestions to address these concerns. Authorship of academic publications confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial benefits. It also implies responsibility, ownership and accountability for published research work1. In academia, publications are also frequently used as an important measure of research productivity for both individual researchers and their institutions. But who should be an author?

Despite its importance, not all institutions or research groups have established authorship guidelines. Authorship conventions vary across disciplines, universities and even research groups within the same discipline or university. For biomedical researchers, the most commonly used guidelines are the ‘International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’(ICMJE) guidelines established by ICMJE member journals including the British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association,... Since 1985, the ICMJE has provided evolving guidance on how authorship should be managed in the complex setting of biomedical science2. Many non-ICMJE journals, voluntarily use these recommendations. They are also recommended in international research guidelines such as those of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS)3.

Home > USC Columbia > College of Information and Communications > Information Science, School of > Faculty Publications > 424 Nicole A. Vasilevsky Ehsan MohammadiFollow Mohammad Hosseini Samantha Teplitzky Violeta Ilik Juliane Schneider Barbara Kern Julien Colomb Scott C. Edmunds Karen Gutzman Daniel S. Himmelstein Marijane White Britton Smith Lisa O'Keefe Melissa Haendel Kristi L. Holmes

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging on many levels. Here we discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to the concept of authorship that may impede the recognition of contributions to a scholarly work. Recent work in the field of authorship shows that shifting to a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. Recent efforts to enable better recognition of contributions to scholarship include the development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems for structuring contributions. We also introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), which provides a simple data model that relates the contributor to research objects via the role that they played, as well as the provenance of the... Finally, requirements for the adoption of a contributorship-based approach are discussed.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1779591 Accountability in Research, Volume 28, Issue 1, 2020, pages 23-43. The purpose of this guidance is to facilitate increased transparency in the determination of authorship to ensure that collegial and ethical interactions are professionally initiated, maintained, documented, and resolved. The School of Public Health recommends the use of the McNutt, et al. criteria which have arisen from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (McNutt, et al., 2018). These criteria allow for authorship parameters that are more inclusive than other established models and are conducive to the collaborative environment of public health research.

According to the criteria, individuals should be considered authors if they meet the following criteria of a, b, and c: a. Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the... b. to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author's contribution to the study); Interdisciplinary research (IDR) has the potential to address complex contemporary challenges by integrating insights from diverse disciplines.

Previous literature has suggested that a key determinant of interdisciplinary research is collaboration between researchers. However, empirical studies have not resulted in a rich or coherent understanding of the relevance of collaboration in IDR. The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between collaboration and interdisciplinary research. We develop and test various hypotheses on the relationship between the interdisciplinarity of a published paper and various aspects of its author team, such as its size and its disciplinary diversity. Our findings, based on our institution’s record of publications, do not lend support to the commonly held belief that larger author teams tend to produce more interdisciplinary outputs. Likewise, counting the disciplines represented in author teams, or counting the disciplines ever published in by these members produce relatively weak predictors of IDR.

The strongest predictors of IDR, in our analysis, is having a diverse knowledge base given the authors’ past publications, along with having a track records of publishing IDR. While associative, these findings suggest that the circumstances in which collaboration leads to interdisciplinary research are more limiting than previously thought. This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access. Price excludes VAT (USA) Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. We note an anomaly in the coefficient estimates of Team size and Team Expertise Variety being negative (albeit close to zero) despite having a positive bivariate correlation with the Rao Stirling index as reported... Multicollinearity can provide an explanation for this, as the Variance Inflation Factors for each of the four predictors ranged from 1.3 to 1.8.

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Zhang, L. (2018). A comparison of two approaches for measuring interdisciplinary research output: The disciplinary diversity of authors vs the disciplinary diversity of the reference list. Journal of Informetrics, 12(4), 1182–1193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.09.001

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