Best practices for allocating appropriate credit and responsibility to authors of multi-authored articles

Abstract

Working in multidisciplinary teams has become a common feature of modern research processes. This situation inevitably leads to the question of how to decide on who to acknowledge as authors of a multi-authored publication. The question is gaining pertinence, since individual scientists' publication records are playing an increasingly important role in their professional success. At worst, discussions about authorship allocation might lead to a serious conflict among coworkers that could even endanger the successful completion of a whole research project. Surprisingly, there does not seem to be any discussion on the issue of ethical standards for authorship is the field of Cognitive Science at the moment. In this short review I address the problem by characterizing modern challenges to a fair system for allocating authorship. I also offer a list of best practice principles and recommendations for determining authors in multi-authored publications on the basis of a review of existing standards.

Keywords: authorship; contributorship; responsible conduct of research; scientific publishing.