Playing fast and loose with authorship conventions

Recently, I came across an article that discussed the thorny issue of authorship in the era of artificial intelligence chatbots. It also raised a number of other questionable authorship practices, such as assigning authorship to pets or to honorary authors—‘authors’ who are included on papers simply because of their seniority, perhaps because they may have secured funding, but who didn’t actually contribute to the paper intellectually.

The article prompted me to explore what kind of unusual authors may have been published in the scientific literature, but on a deeper level I pondered the changing definition of ‘author’ in the scientific enterprise.

Animals as co-authors?

When I was a senior postdoc at the University of Cambridge, the research institute I was affiliated with had a resident cat, Muon (pictured top right). Around that time, one of my postdoc colleagues wrote a conference paper to which he added the cat as a co-author. I actually tried quite hard to find that article, but my colleague seems to have successfully erased it from the internet, perhaps just as well…

A small subset of ‘pet authors’ is usually paraded as examples of dubious ethics. The ‘usual suspects’ that are often brought up as examples include:

1. F. D. C. Willard—Felix Domesticus Chester Willard—a Siamese cat, was included as a co-author of an article published in 1975 in Physical Review Letters by the University of Michigan physics professor Jack Hetherington. Hetherington added his cat so as to avoid having to rewrite his entire single-author article in the first person singular;
2. H.A.M.S. ter Tisha (that is, a hamster named Tisha) was added to a 2001 paper in Physica B: Condensed Matter by the Nobel laureate Andrei Geim of (at the time) Radboud University Nijmegen (before he was awarded his Nobel prize);
3. Galadriel Mirkwood, immunologist Polly Matzinger's dog, listed with as affiliation the University of California at San Diego, was added to a 1978 paper in the Journal of Experimental Immunology;
4. Three bonobos (great apes) named Kanzi Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba and Nyota Wamba were added to a 2007 article in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. I note that some commentators have made a case for great apes as contributors to knowledge generation, but that is a topic for another post.

While some may think that adding humour to one’s dry scholarly work allows for some levity, humour is culturally specific and more often than not doesn’t translate across cultures or languages.

Other than these oft-cited examples, I have not found many other instances of unusual authors on scientific papers. While some may think that adding humour to one’s dry scholarly work allows for some levity, humour is culturally specific and more often than not doesn’t translate across cultures or languages. That is not to say, of course, that animals have never been awarded human credentials, for humorous reasons or otherwise.

Reputational harm

The peer-review and editorial processes are clearly stacked against allowing unusual authors to appear on scientific papers. Perhaps from an editorial perspective, such indulgence may ultimately affect a journal's respectability. In fact, a keen desire to maintain a journal's respectability helps us weed out predatory journals from the genuine scholarly literature. Various sting campaigns have, of course, targeted predatory journals, some leading to the successful publication of nonsensical articles. Examples of the latter are papers allegedly written by fake authors, such as an article authored by Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel, two cartoon characters from The Simpsons.

However, more importantly for genuine journals that want to keep their reputation untarnished, there are some serious ethical implications to consider here. Numerous journals that aspire to upholding the highest ethical standards have adopted a version of the ‘Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals’ issued since 1979 by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Their current version, last updated in May 2022, recommends that for anyone to claim authorship, four criteria ought to be met:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data for the work; and
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
3. Final approval of the version to be published; and
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In this context, pets don’t qualify as co-authors, given that they won’t be able to meet all four criteria. Speaking about adhering to those criteria, when in 2018 it was revealed that researchers in South Korea had included their school-aged children as co-authors so as to boost the kids' chances of university admission, their government took swift action and launched a probe into alleged misconduct. This leads to the murky waters of kinship and nepotism in the academy, issues one would be wise to steer far clear of.

I also came across an online discussion where a researcher pondered adding his baby as co-author to a paper as an act of protest against senior authors demanding co-authorship for no apparent contribution. Most respondents quickly reminded him of the ethical quagmire of doing so, and some also pointed out that such an act of protest might inadvertently affect the baby’s future career.

Many disciplines have established their own norms of assigning authorship and determining the authorship order.

Authorship order

One largely overlooked aspect of humour in awarding authorship relates to choices made to determine an article's authorship order. Many disciplines have established their own norms, particularly as regards the authorship order in large collaborations or where early-career researchers are credited alongside senior scientists. However, among more equal partnerships authors tend to have more leeway to determine the order in which they appear, sometimes using more innovative means.

Reading about such examples reminded me of a series of four articles from the early 1980s co-authored by my own PhD advisor and one of his close collaborators. The authorship order on all four papers was the same, with my advisor coming first; in their fourth paper, a footnote on the first page read,

The order of the authors’ names in this series of papers has been decided in each case by tossing a coin. The coin used for this purpose is fully described in a forthcoming monograph “The van der Kruitguilder” by P. C. van der Kruit [my advisor] and L. Searle, to be published in the series “Curiosités Numismatiques", Monte Carlo.

Other examples of published, playful means to determine a paper's authorship sequence include playing three games of Mario Kart’s Super Smash Bros., competing on the basketball court, ordering by proximity to tenure decision and a whole slew of other unusual approaches.

A final aspect of scientific paper authorship that seems to be at odds with the ICMJE guidelines are the ever-growing author lists, particularly in fields like particle physics, space science and genome sequencing. I would be keen to hear your thoughts about these developments: is this desirable, and if not, what should we do about it? Leave your comments below!

Richard de Grijs is an academic and journal editor with more than 25 years of experience in the physical sciences. In March 2018, he joined Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) as Associate Dean (Global Engagement). Richard is an AuthorAID Steward and INASP Associate. He presently serves as Managing Editor of the News section of the AuthorAID website.