From: Amy Brand <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2017 05:06:44 -0500

Thanks for sharing this Jim. Transparency in the review process is
important, yes, but so is transparency in author/contributor roles, and a
community-wide effort called CRediT (for contributor role taxonomy) is now
gaining ground. Lots of links I could include here, but one is
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/20/140228 and references
there. When roles like "supervision" and "funding" are explicitly called
out, it clarifies real authorship.

Amy Brand

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 4:22 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2017 13:58:12 -0700
>
> Saw on LJ's invariably interesting InfoDocket, validating that if you
> give people an incentive to do something, some will do it:
>
> “Authorship and Citation Manipulation in Academic Research” in PLOS:
> doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0187394
>
> Abstract:
> Some scholars add authors to their research papers or grant proposals
> even when those individuals contribute nothing to the research effort.
> Some journal editors coerce authors to add citations that are not
> pertinent to their work and some authors pad their reference lists
> with superfluous citations. How prevalent are these types of
> manipulation, why do scholars stoop to such practices, and who among
> us is most susceptible to such ethical lapses? This study builds a
> framework around how intense competition for limited journal space and
> research funding can encourage manipulation and then uses that
> framework to develop hypotheses about who manipulates and why they do
> so. We test those hypotheses using data from over 12,000 responses to
> a series of surveys sent to more than 110,000 scholars from eighteen
> different disciplines spread across science, engineering, social
> science, business, and health care. We find widespread misattribution
> in publications and in research proposals with significant variation
> by academic rank, discipline, sex, publication history, co-authors,
> etc. Even though the majority of scholars disapprove of such tactics,
> many feel pressured to make such additions while others suggest that
> it is just the way the game is played. The findings suggest that
> certain changes in the review process might help to stem this ethical
> decline, but progress could be slow.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> ASU
>