Multiauthorship and false authorship: Why worrying about this?

Abstract

Authorship and authorship abuse are in the focus of interest of all main actors in the publication game - authors, reviewers and editors of scientific journals. Along with the steady rise of the number of publications, the number of coauthors in multiauthored papers raises even more, some of them being undeserved authors. Because publication is the main way for evaluating scientists, authorship is prone to abuse, and thus the false/undeserved/gift authorship emerges. This dilutes the responsibility and damages the publication enterprise, thus initiating a constant struggle of scientific community against this type of scientific dishonesty. In this paper, several prevention and corrective measures with the aim to diminish such a dishonest behavior of authors are described.

Keywords

• scholarly publications
• multiauthorship
• authorship misuse
• evaluation