13 - What Does Authorship Mean?

Summary

The issue of what authorship means – who deserves credit and what one’s name “hanging from the masthead” (Burman, 1982) actually means about contribution to the article – never came up in my graduate program. Since the 1980s there has been a continuing spate of articles about the ethics of authorship and concern about the increasing number of authors listed on individual papers (Bennett & Taylor, 2003; Holaday & Yost, 1995; Marušić, Bošnjak, Jerončić, 2011; Smith, 1994). Most of these concerns have been expressed in the medical or life sciences, less often in the social sciences, and all of them involve unwarranted credit for authorship – authorship as a “gift.” The ethical issue about authorship I am presenting is different. It concerns whether the content of the article is something all authors agree with, which, I assumed, one’s name as an author would mean (Janssens, 2014).

As a new relatively inexperienced PhD graduate, I was given the opportunity to supervise the continued collection of data in a longitudinal study. My portion, of course, was small and not part of the primary data being collected on the sample. Nevertheless, it seemed as though I could not only make a contribution but also achieve some recognition for it in the way of publications. I was working with a strong senior scientist in the field, someone with whom it would be good to link my name in journal articles.