Frontiers in Psychology (Sep 2011)
Best practices for allocating appropriate credit and responsibility to authors of multi-authored articles
Abstract
Today’s research process is characterized by multidisciplinary research projects. This situation inevitably leads to the question on how to decide on who will be an author of a multi-authored publication. This question becomes even more important as scientists must stand up for their own interest because of the ever-increasing importance of individual scientists’ publication records. At worst, discussions about authorship allocation might lead to a serious conflict among coworkers that might even endanger the successful completion of a whole research project. Surprisingly, ethical standards on authorship are apparently not discussed in the field of Cognitive Science. In this short review I therefore characterize the modern challenges to a fair system for allocating authorship and review existing standards to compile a list of best practice principles and recommendations for determining authors in multi-authored publications.
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