Is Ghost authorship unethical?

Is Ghost authorship unethical?

There are important ethical issues to understand with both honorary and ghost authorship. Ghost authorship is likewise problematic and unethical, as it does not provide credit where credit is due and can be used to manipulate the data and findings.

How is authorship determined for a journal article?

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria: Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND.

What is honorary authorship?

Honorary authorship refers to those who are named as authors merely because they hold senior positions within the service or facility where the research occurred, and may have helped secure funding.

What does it mean to be the last author?

As one’s career progresses, being last author and author for correspondence signals that this is a paper from one’s Unit, he/she is the main person responsible for its contents, and a younger colleague has made major contributions to the paper, hence he/she is designated as the first author.

What is a ghost authorship?

A ghost author is a person who has made a substantial contribution to the research or writing of a manuscript but is not named as an author [2–4]. Those who make small contributions that would not qualify them as an author should be listed in the acknowledgements with the extent of their contribution clearly stated.

Can there be multiple first authors?

Sometimes papers have multiple first authors, in the sense that it is stated explicitly in the paper that “These authors have contributed equally to the work”. But in citations and reference lists this information is often not preserved, and so the paper will, for many purposes, only have one first author.