Issues of Authorship

Abstract

Publishing is the currency of academia, it is in large part the measure of the worth of an investigator in any academic field. The need to publish, combined with other institutional pressures for funding, promotion, etc., may contribute to temptations to be named as authors inappropriately or worse. Institutional norms, and diverging norms among various fields, make the landscape for rules about authorship complex. To what degree and for what reasons must authors be named and in what order? What scientific norms demand which forms of behavior by an author regarding truth? What counts as authorship, and why is this important to science? I explore these issues below and offer some guidance for authors concerned about conflicts with norms of authorship within and among institutions, taking cues from the Mertonian norms discussed above.