The system of scientific authorship is obviously in question, if not actually broken, as the answers to Richard Horton's (Sept 12, p 892)1
question on the relation between academic reward and publication clearly show. So-called salami publication, undeserving authors, and duplicate publications-all grave abuses of the strict authorship criteria2
-are not new, and the recent move to publishing specific contributions of individual investigators3
will probably not prevent these abuses from occurring.
The system of scientific authorship does not function well because it does not have an inherent control mechanism, independent of outside (eg, editorial or guarantor) control. Its link with academic reward is the cause for this malfunction. Science is a human effort and is thus inevitably contaminated with all human weaknesses.4
Individual researchers or groups who accept a false coauthor cannot be controlled by signing solemn statements, even when their roles are explicitly described in the contributor section. Those who lie can lie at any time, and asking for signatures or contribution descriptions would not change this fact.
As long as publication is the sole basis for academic advancement, a solution is unlikely to be found. However, it would be worthwhile to construct a simple system of self-regulating authorship rules, applicable to less authoritative journals and to less organised environments, in which the coauthoring of significant papers means even more than in mainstream science.
The basis for such a system could be partial authorship,5
under which an article bears one unit of authorship that is equally divided among authors. A scientist's production is judged by his or her sum of partial authorships, so they would be reluctant to accept undeserving colleagues, and the system would function without outside control. This system could be made more sophisticated by ascribing higher partial authorship to the first or last author, by associating the article's authorship units with a journal's impact factors and by further weighting of the authorship-journal association by use of impact factors corrected by the size of the research area.5
We are aware that partial authorship is not a new idea. However, false authorship is not new either, and, as Horton's article1
proves, calls for action. Even an imperfect solution is better than a lasting dilemma.