Abstract
The misconduct in medical research and publication has been considered widespread by the journal editors and serious academicians. This presumption appears to be supported by fact that a very little empirical research has been performed in medical sciences especially in underdeveloped or developing countries1. This trend has been widely attributed to enhanced trend in “pressure to publish” which is resulted in the principle of “publish or perish”, and this ultimately leads to increase prevalence in publication misconduct. Due to this, many serious trends or problems including duplication of work, data fabrication, failure to obtain participant informed consent, by passing ethical concerns, plagiarism, redundant publication, authorship issues and so on has become more prevalent2,3. The most common and pressing concerns faced by the editors are authorship assignment and authorship disputes.
An “author is a person who creates a work, e.g., a novel, a movie, or a scientific research article”3. In my view in this definition, the latter, is a special beast because creative freedom is very limited for him while writing up his scientific results as compared to first two. It’s important to get authorship right because it more or less renders directly to the career development and in project funding. Similarly, the authorship order can also make a difference in career progression and promotion in one with fewer options4. That’s why the rules matter. It’s a matter of fairness to get justified authorship rights. Therefore, it should be as clear as possible on the principal of what is acceptable and what is not.
The first and important question is who is an author? At the other end a person can be named as an author even if he has not contributed in project or substantially in actual writing of manuscript. In true sense, a research paper involves more than only conception of idea and manuscript writing because before writing phase it involves several stages like planning, execution, ethical issues, data collection, data analysis and interpretation. Therefore, usually many researchers, with highly specialized expertise, work together on a research project. Among them some were titled as authors, others as contributors or acknowledged depending the contribution in the project4,5.
Ishtiaq Ahmed, Umar Ali Khan, Khadija Iqbal, Humaira Zafar. (2021) Authorship and its issues: Need to consider seriously, Isra Medical Journal, Volume 13, Issue 02.
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