Abstract:

Guest authorships occur when people who have not made a significant contribution to a study are made co-authors. Recent studies (Goddiksen et al, 2023; Helgeson et al, 2022) , indicate that around a third of PhD students in Europe believe they have awarded at least one guest authorship during their PhD. Goddiksen and colleagues (2023) also found that PhD students from the medical sciences are three times more likely to have awarded a guest authorship than PhD students from the social sciences, humanities, and law, and 1.5 times more likely than PhD students from STEM.

In this collouquium, we will discuss why guest authorships are awarded, what factors explain the differences across faculties, and which implications these results may have.       

References:

Goddiksen MP, Johansen MW, Armond AC, Clavien C, Hogan L, Kovács N, et al. (2023) “The person in power told me to”—European PhD students’ perspectives on guest authorship and good authorship practice. PLoS ONE 18(1): e0280018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280018

Helgesson, G., Holm, S., Bredahl, L. et al. Misuse of co-authorship in Medical PhD Theses in Scandinavia: A Questionnaire Survey. J Acad Ethics 21, 393–406 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-022-09465-1

About the speaker:

Mads P. Goddiksen is Post Doc at the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. He does empirical and theoretical research on responsible conduct of research and academic integrity and is involved in the teaching of RCR to both PhD students, undergraduates and senior staff.