Coauthorship Hitchhiking: Indicators and Effects in Scientifi c Development in Mongolia

This paper discusses about a phenomenon newly called as the “coauthorship hitchhiking,” a term we coined to denote the inclusion of coauthors in peer-reviewed publications without signifi cant intellectual input from these coauthors to the published works. We feel that this phenomenon has become fairly common due to increasing international research interest in Mongolia as international authors include Mongolian researchers as coauthor(s) in their publications. Collaborative work is important and indeed required to advance knowledge frontier, but it needs signifi cant input from all coauthors to be a truly collaborative research output, namely a scientifi c publication. Although the coauthorship hitchhiking is benefi cial to career of individual researchers, it is detrimental to overall improvement of scientifi c thinking in the country. The authorship should be limited to those who have substantially contributed to the work and who have a shared responsibility for the results.