Authorship in ecology: attribution, accountability, and responsibility

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org A published in peer-reviewed journals are the medium by which scientists present their findings to the scholarly community. The quality and quantity of publications are essential components for building careers, funding projects, and generating a sense of accomplishment and self-worth (Lindsey 1980). The past five decades have seen a proliferation of scientific subdisciplines, an increase in the number of researchers and collaborative manuscripts, and a corresponding increase in multi-authored articles (Regalado 1995; Cronin 2001). Multiple authorship is an increasing trend that has now become the norm, but there remains a paucity of useful and definitive guidelines to aid researchers in addressing authorship issues (Rennie et al. 1997; Klein and Moser-Veillon 1999). Although several journals (eg The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) have adopted clearly defined guidelines that specify criteria for authorship and communicate that information to the readers, most journals have only vague or non-existent guidelines (Rennie et al. 2000). In the absence of standardized definitions or guidelines on authorship (eg criteria for author inclusion or order), scientists employ a variety of personal criteria that are unknown to readers and that probably differ from criteria employed by other authors, even for articles in the same journal. For example, individual authors, laboratory groups, or even subdisciplines may determine byline composition and order based on arbitrary or idiosyncratic traditions, customs, or habits. As such, the order in which authors are listed communicates little information about the importance of the contribution of each individual, since a wide variety of undisclosed methods are used to assign order (Rennie et al. 2000). This can create an environment in which credit, accountability, and responsibility for research are neither personally accepted nor publicly acknowledged (Zuckerman 1968). A lack of communication about authorship may engender interpersonal issues and ethical dilemmas if undeserving individuals are included as authors, or if contributing researchers are not included (Rennie and Flanagin 1994; Rennie et al. 1997). The purpose of this article is to discuss potential approaches to deciding who should be included in the authorship byline, and in what order. We recommend improved communication among authors during the writing process, and outline an approach used by other science disciplines, wherein authors publish their contributions to a manuscript in a separate byline (eg Panel 1).