Authorship Decision Making: An Empirical Investigation

This empirical study concerns the authorship credit decision-making processes and outcomes that occur among coauthors in cases of multiauthored publications. The 2002 American Psychological Association (APA) Ethics Code offers standards for determining authorship order; however, little is known about how these decisions are made in actual practice. Results from a survey of 109 randomly selected authors indicated that most authors were satisfied with the decision-making process and outcome with few disagreements. Participants reported cases of both undeserved authorship being given and omission of deserving contributors' names as coauthors. Some factors associated with authorship decisions included “sense of loyalty or obligation,” “publish or perish pressures,” and “power differentials.” Authors who used APA standards were significantly more satisfied with both the process and outcome of authorship credit decisions.     

The authorship list in science: Junior physicists’ perceptions of who appears and why

A questionnaire probing the distribution of authorship credit was given to postdoctoral associates (“postdocs”) in order to determine their awareness of the professional society’s ethical statement on authorship, the extent of communication with their supervisors about authorship criteria, and the appropriateness of authorship assignments on submitted papers. Results indicate a low awareness of the professional society’s ethical statement and that little communication takes place between postdocs and supervisors about authorship criteria. A substantial amount of authorship credit given to supervisors and other workers is perceived by the postdocs to violate the professional society’s ethical statement.     

A proposal for a new system of credit allocation in science

This essay discusses some of the problems with current authorship practices and puts forward a proposal for a new system of credit allocation: in published works, scientists should more clearly define the responsibilities and contributions of members of research teams and should distinguish between different roles, such as author, statistican, technician, grant writer, data collector, and so forth. Dr. Resnik is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics, University of Wyoming. Information is available on website: http://www.uwyo.edu/bu/acct/cae.htm     

Some problems concerning language and physics

We discuss three problems concerning the use of formal languages in theoretical physics: (i) the definability of time and spacetime in classical physical theories; (ii) how to cope with indistinguishable elementary particles in quantum mechanics without labeling them; and (iii) how to get a formal picture of quantum states jumping.     

Policies and perspectives on authorship

Authorship on publications has been described as a “meal ticket” for researchers in academic settings. Given the importance of authorship, inappropriate publication credit is a pertinent ethical issue. This paper presents an overview of authorship problems and policies intended to address them. Previous work has identified three types of inappropriate authorship practices: plagiarism, giving unwarranted credit and failure to give expected credit. Guidelines from universities, journals and professional organizations provide standards about requirements of authors and may describe inappropriate practices; to a lesser extent, they provide guidance for determining authorship order. While policies on authorship may be helpful in some circumstances, they are not panaceas. Formal guidelines may not address serious power imbalances in working relationships and may be difficult to enforce in the face of particular departmental or institutional cultures. In order to develop more effective and useful guidelines, we should gain more knowledge about how students and faculty members perceive policies as well as their understanding of how policies will best benefit collaborators.     

The physics of evolution: From chaos to evolution and deep ecology

This paper summarizes the various physical science elements of the evolutionary story. The “nonlinear” revolution includes chaos, self‐organization theory, the thermodynamics of evolution, and biological evolution. The key result of the revolution is a physical understanding of how order emerges and change is driven. This paper brings the lessons of each branch of the revolution together into a single easily understood thread. The unexpected result of this revolution is an understanding of evolution as a single inexorable physical process that has given rise to everything from molecules to humankind. Here evolution is driven by energy flow and involves increasing efficiency, the growth of complexity, and the acceleration of change. This paper ties the resulting physical insights to an evolving ecological world view, looks at its ties to spirituality and applies the rules that govern the growth of complexity to business and its current crisis. The net result of the nonlinear revolution is a radical change in our everyday understanding of how the world works, a shift away from classical science's machine world to the vision of an evolving deeply ecologically intertwined world.     

The growing complexity of international policy in intellectual property

Intellectual property has historically been a self-contained policy at the international level. With the introduction of the TRIPs Agreement in 1994 and developments since the conclusion of the TRIPs Agreement, the relationship between intellectual property policy and other areas of public policy has become much more complex and interactive. This shift reflects the centrality of intellectual property in the knowledge economy, the rapid development of enabling technologies, notably the Internet and biotechnology, and the advent of the networked society. The consequences of this shift are manifold and herald the increased sophistication and complexity that may be expected of intellectual property regimes in the knowledge economy. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “The Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 23–24 April, 2004.     

Productivity and Coauthorship in JPSSM: A Social Network Analysis

This paper examines the key individual contributors and institutional contributors to JPSSM, covering 628 articles written by 761 authors since the journal’s inception in fall/winter 1980 until its fall 2009 issue. The nature and the dynamics of the coauthor networks of the journal’s leading individual contributors are further investigated. Results indicate that leading contributors to JPSSM are also major contributors to other academic outlets that have published sales research. These authors possess at least one common trait: they effectively network and collaborate with other sales scholars. In addition, their coauthor networks change over time, both in membership and in structure. For the most, coauthor networks evolve by reducing some members and bringing in new ones. In many cases, however, membership change is accompanied by a structural change, usually from a fragmented network to a dense network. Research findings have important implications for understanding the development of sales knowledge and the contribution of sales scholars and their institutions. University administrators can also use the findings of this paper as a benchmark to define “reasonable” publication expectations for faculty with an interest in sales management research.     

中医药的专利权保护

中医药为中华民族和世界人民的健康做出了重要贡献,但是由于我国对中医药知识产权保护的落后,我国中医药的珍贵知识财富正为外国大公司无偿地攫取。根据中医药自身的特性,对专利保护的适用、调整、改进及补充作了大胆设想,为我国进一步完善中医药的专利法保护提出了建议。     

Authorship in a small medical journal: A study of contributorship statements by corresponding authors

The authorship criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) are widely accepted in biomedical journals, but many studies in large and prestigious journals show that a considerable proportion of authors do not fulfill these criteria. We investigated authorship contributions in a small medical journal outside the scientific mainstream, to see if poor adherence to authorship criteria is common in biomedical journals. We analyzed statements on research contribution, as checked by the corresponding author, for individual authors of 114 research articles, representing 475 authors, submitted to the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) from 1999 to 2000. Only 40% of authors fulfilled the ICMJE authorship criteria. The authors listed first on the by-line were more likely to fulfill the authorship criteria than all other authors on the by-line. The percentage of authors fulfilling the ICMJE criteria of authorship decreased with the increase in the number of authors listed on the by-line. These results indicate that poor adherence to ICMJE authorship criteria is poor across biomedical journals, regardless of the size of the scientific community. Authorship and contributorship in biomedical journals, as well as editorial ethical responsibilities towards authorship criteria need critical redefinition and education of both editors and authors.     

"形而上"与"形而下"的近代分离--《易》与经学时代中国学者的学术兴趣

近代科学在欧洲的产生,乃得益于"文艺复兴"以来欧洲学术上"形而上"与"形而下"的大规模分离.而汉以来"独尊儒术"的实现,<易>作为儒家主要经籍以其"仰观天文,俯察地理,中知人事"的宏大叙事与终极关怀,影响了经学时代中国学者的学术兴趣,导致他们将绝大多数精力投入到了以史学为主的"人事"中而非自然事物的研究对象与形而下的研究路径.两个相对独立的历史进程与历史体系或无何可比性:近代科学在欧洲产生只有在产生近代科学的欧洲自我历史进程与历史体系中才能得到解释,中国没有产生近代科学亦复如此.至于将中国科学落后的原由单一性地归结于<易>或儒家经学,这未必符合历史的因果真相与思维的有效推理.     

Proliferation of authors on research reports in medicine

Publication in the biomedical literature is important because it is the major pathway by which new concepts and discoveries are disseminated amongst scientists. In the last 30 years there has been a dramatic increase, not only in the volume of publications but in the number of authors per article as well. This paper summarizes the current literature on authorship and its proliferation in medicine. From the literature it becomes clear that for biomedical articles, the mean number of authors increased from 1.7 in 1960 to 3.1 in 1990, and there are indications that this trend is even greater in clinical medicine such that single authorship almost has disappeared. Formal guidelines of who should be considered an author have been set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. There are studies suggesting that not all authors on multiauthor papers fulfill these criteria. Inappropriate multiple authorship leads to dilution of authorship responsibility and unjustified citation in curriculum vitae. Recommendations regarding the prevention of inappropriate authorship are given in this paper. This paper is adapted from a lecture presented to a Symposium on Scientific Integrity, Warsaw, Poland, 23 November 1995. Dr. Drenth is a clinical investigator and resident in internal medicine.     

Time to completion of web-based physics problems with tutoring

We studied students performing a complex learning task, that of solving multipart physics problems with interactive tutoring on the web. We extracted the rate of completion and fraction completed as a function of time on task by retrospectively analyzing the log of student-tutor interactions. There was a spontaneous division of students into three groups, the central (and largest) group (about 65% of the students) being those who solved the problem in real time after multiple interactions with the tutorial program (primarily receiving feedback to submitted wrong answers and requesting hints). This group displayed a sigmoidal fraction-completed curve as a function of logarithmic time. The sigmoidal shape is qualitatively flatter for problems that do not include hints and wrong-answer responses. We argue that the group of students who respond quickly (about 10% of the students) is obtaining the answer from some outside source. The third group (about 25% of the students) represents those who interrupt their solution, presumably to work offline or to obtain outside help.     

中药传统文化保护的现状与问题研究

中药为我国的国民健康做出了巨大贡献,并已走向世界,但是,我国的中药产业并没有得到繁荣。出现这种现象,与我国实施与中药传统文化不相适宜的专利、商标、商业秘密、地理标志等西方创造的知识产权制度保护中药有关,我国的《中药品种保护条例》存在问题,我国缺乏中药传统文化创新激励机制和自主制定的中药国际法体系。因此,为了有效保护中药传统文化,必须建立适合我国中药文化特色的保护制度和创新激励机制。     

Can authorship policies help prevent scientific misconduct? What role for scientific societies?

The purpose of this article is to encourage and help inform active discussion of authorship policies among members of scientific societies. The article explains the history and rationale of the influential criteria for authorship developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, examines questions about those criteria that emerge from authorship policies adopted by several U.S. medical schools, and summarizes the arguments for replacing authorship with the contributor-guarantor model. Finally, it concludes with a plea for scientific societies to play a prominent role in the ongoing debates about authorship and the alternatives as part of their efforts to encourage ethical conduct among their members. Whether or not scientific societies develop authorship policies of their own, they should undertake vigorous educational efforts to keep their new members adequately informed about the importance of authorship practices in ethical scientific research and publication.     

Guidelines for training in the ethical conduct of scientific research

Historically, scientists in training have learned the rules of ethical conduct by the example of their advisors and other senior scientists and by practice. This paper is intended to serve as a guide for the beginning scientist to some fundamental principles of scientific research ethics. The paper focuses less on issues of outright dishonesty or fraud, and more on the positive aspects of ethical scientific behavior; in other words, what a scientist should do to maintain a high level of ethical conduct in research. There are a number of fairly specific rules, guidelines, or commonly accepted operating principles that have evolved for the ethical conduct of science. In order to discuss this code of ethics, this paper is divided into sections dealing with specific areas of scientific ethics. These areas are: data collection and storage, ownership of data, confidentiality, communication, authorship, collaboration, the peer review system, and rules of dealing with ethical complaints. Illustrative case histories are presented to provide examples of the type of ethical dispute or problem being discussed. If scientific trainees learn the accepted rules of behavior that govern the conduct of science, ethical problems that arise out of ignorance, misunderstanding, or poor communication can be avoided.     

联合国教科文组织国际生命伦理学委员会第八届会议报告

2001年9月12～14日,国际生命伦理学委员会(IBC)第八届会议在联合国教科文组织(UNESCO)总部法国巴黎举行。会议讨论了由其工作小组起草的两个规划报告：第一是关于伦理学、知识产权和基因组学。第二是基因资料的收集、处理、贮存和使用。会议还召开了生命伦理学和青年人教育的圆桌会议,并在大会上介绍了蛋白质基因组学的伦理学方面的研究进展;最后,委员们讨论关于个人资料保护的问题,并形成了相关决议。     

医学论文署名不实现象的伦理审思与对策

提出署名不实的概念,从社会文化层面探讨学术论文署名不实的原因及相应对策,为署名问题的治理提供借鉴。运用文献研究法,对论文署名相关的文献和资料进行分析。相较于署名不当、署名不端,署名不实所涵盖的内容更加全面,更能客观、恰当地概括署名问题。论文署名不实的社会文化因素包括"唯成果论"的学术氛围、学术体制官僚化以及人情观念泛滥。通过开展学术规范与诚信教育、改革科研评价和奖励制度、完善学术期刊建设、加大惩处力度以及加强学术不端惩治监督,达到治理论文署名问题的目的。     

Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy

This paper evaluates the economic assumptions of economic theory via an examination of the capitalist transformation of creditor–debtor relations in the 18th century. This transformation enabled masses of people to obtain credit without moral opprobrium or social subordination. Classical 18th century economics had the ethical concepts to appreciate these facts. Ironically, contemporary economic theory cannot. I trace this fault to its abstract representations of freedom, efficiency, and markets. The virtues of capitalism lie in the concrete social relations and social meanings through which capital and commodities are exchanged. Contrary to laissez faire capitalism, the conditions for sustaining these concrete capitalist formations require limits on freedom of contract and the scope of private property rights.     

The ethical implications of the new research paradigm

Research is now an increasingly heterogeneous activity involving an expanded range of new actors and stake-holders and employing an eclectic range of epistemologies and methodologies. The emergence of these new research paradigms — and, in particular, of so-called ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production that is highly contextualised and socially distributed — raises new and challenging ethical issues and also important questions about the autonomy of science and the social responsibilities of scientists.