Authorship: An Evolving Concept

Authorship: An Evolving Concept

Nov 2015

Authors Steph Fairbairn, Leanne Kelly, Selina Mahar, and Reinier Prosée

Editorial coordinators, Health Learning, Research & Practice | Wolters Kluwer

The role and definition of authorship in scientific and medical publishing has become increasingly complicated in recent years. In most other forms of publishing – social sciences, humanities, legal – we assume that three, perhaps four, authors collaborated in the writing of the work. However, the nature of scientific research and reporting means that “authorship” no longer fits into a neat category. To elaborate, a researcher who didn’t write the text of a paper can still be considered an author if her or she contributed substantially to the conception of the work, or the analysis of the data. Access to the Internet has made sharing information and collaborating on projects far simpler, and many authors can now work closely with colleagues in different countries. With such a proliferation of collaboration and co-authorship in academic writing, it becomes harder to differentiate between a “contributor” and an “author.” Moreover, the pressures of funding applications, securing tenure at an academic institution, and the requirement to meet publication quotas all play their part in pushing contributors to demand a co-authorship accreditation.