What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

Pruschak, Gernot (2021). What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences? Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 6(655535) Frontiers 10.3389/frma.2021.655350

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Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks. Arising from this, social scientific literature has especially discussed author orders and the distribution of publication and citation credits among co-authors in depth. Yet only a small fraction of the authorship literature has also addressed the actual underlying question of what actually constitutes authorship. To identify social scientists' motives for assigning authorship, we conduct an empirical study surveying researchers around the globe. We find that social scientists tend to distribute research tasks among (individual) research team members. Nevertheless, they generally adhere to the universally applicable Vancouver criteria when distributing authorship. More specifically, participation in every research task with the exceptions of data work as well as reviewing and remarking increases scholars' chances to receive authorship. Based on our results, we advise journal editors to introduce authorship guidelines that incorporate the Vancouver criteria as they seem applicable to the social sciences. We further call upon research institutions to emphasize data skills in hiring and promotion processes as publication counts might not always depict these characteristics.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

Business School > Business Foundations and Methods
Business School > Institute for Applied Data Science & Finance
Business School > Institute for Applied Data Science & Finance > Applied Data Science
Business School

Name:

Pruschak, Gernot

Subjects:

H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)

Publisher:

Frontiers

Language:

English

Submitter:

Gernot Pruschak

Date Deposited:

07 Jul 2021 12:03

Last Modified:

22 Dec 2021 10:31

Publisher DOI:

10.3389/frma.2021.655350

Uncontrolled Keywords:

academic incentive system, authorship, ethics in research, research tasks, specialization, survey, research

ARBOR DOI:

10.24451/arbor.15073

URI:

https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/15073

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