Inappropriate authorship in collaborative science research.

philosophical notion, nor think that proper attribution is simply a This content downloaded from 207.46.13.11 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 04:55:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms INAPPROPRIATE COLLABORATIVE AUTHORSHIP 383 matter of etiquette, because with responsibility may come reward. In the case at hand there are tangible benefits that can accrue from authorship. Authorship determines not only reputation in the field, but also salaries, tenure, promotion, bonuses and grant funding. Other things being equal, researchers who author no or only a few papers typically find themselves receiving fewer of these benefits than those who publish more because administrators who divvy up the rewards do so largely on the basis of numbers of publications. As a sign of responsibility, authorship lets us know who is deserving and so whom we ought to reward. The other side of the coin of responsibility is responsibility for wrongdoing or error. In legal terms we might think of this as liability; we need to know who to blame when there is negligence or fraud. On the current system of co-authorship, it would follow that all the named researchers would be liable for wrong-doing in the same way that they are all claiming and would receive credit if that is due. But how many scientists are willing to accept responsibility for "someone else's" negligence or fraud? One sometimes sees a subset of authors of a report publishing a retraction and distancing themselves from their co-authors when there has been a charge of data-fabrication or some other wrong-doing. If someone is willing to accept credit as an author, it is reasonable to expect them to accept blame as well. On the other hand, it is also important that we not hold responsible for some outcome someone who had no control over it. For persons to have moral responsibility requires that they have a role that gives them the ability to choose and to take one course of action rather than another, and thus potentially to make a difference to the outcome. Those who could take no action (or no significant action) in a situation bear no responsibility and so cannot properly share either the blame or the credit. Therefore, what we should expect to see in ethically grounded attribution is a report of those researchers who were in a position to act and make a difference and who take responsibility for the same. A third ethical principle that applies to authorship is that of justice. We mostly speak of justice in contexts of political or social rights, but the ethical notion properly has a much broader scope. Aristotle's formal principle of justice tells us we should treat equals equally and unequals unequally. (This is a "formal" principle in the sense that it describes the logical structure for just judgment and action, but does not provide the content.) Justice demands "discrimination" in the positive sense that those who deserve greater reward should receive greater reward and those who deserve less should receive less. In the case at hand, justice requires that recognition be given to whom it is due by virtue of their contributions to the research and not to others who do not deserve it (and similarly for