Is it ethical for advisors to automatically coauthor papers?

Question

I work in a field (Philosophy) where co-authorship is uncommon and advisors and grad students very seldomly co-author a paper. I've seen a lot of posts on Academia.se though about the ethics of co-authoring papers with mentors, such as this question.

My sense is that it must be somewhat common in the natural sciences for the head of the lab/dissertation advisor to be automatically added as a co-author to every paper that his or her graduate students produce.

My questions are:

• Is this really common, and if so, in which fields?
• Is this really ethical?

My view is that adding your name to something that you had no part in creating is just plagiarism: it's taking credit for the work of others.

The opposite argument, that the work wouldn't have been possible without the PI's grant funding also cuts no ice. I wouldn't have been able to write my dissertation if my parents hadn't had sex, but that doesn't mean they should get credit as coauthoring my work.

That's the way it seems to me, but maybe somebody from these fields can give us a better rationale for (what seems to be) the widespread practice.

Edit: Another argument against the practice. Suppose I'm a billionaire who knows nothing about science, but I take it into my head that I want to be (regarded as) a famous scientist. Suppose I just spend billions of dollars to fund other people to do research. But, I ask each of those people to come and report to me for fifteen minutes ever week about what they've worked on, or discovered that week. Then, every time one of them finds a result, I demand that my name be added to the paper as a co-author, since we have "discussed" the work in progress and it is, after all, by my grace that the funds for the work have been provided. Suppose I just have hundreds of these postdocs, producing thousands of papers a year, all of which I am a coauthor for.

Now ask yourself if I really deserve to be regarded as a famous scientist at all? It seems to me that I don't, because I haven't done any of the science--I haven't suggested any research methods, I haven't designed any experiments, I haven't collected any data, I haven't even helped junior researchers know the shape of the existing literature. You might regard my existence as good for science in some sense--you might think of me as a beneficial patron of the sciences. But you wouldn't think of me as a scientist, right? And you wouldn't think I deserved to be considered for a Nobel Prize, or membership in the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, or whatever. If I demanded that I be given those awards because of the thousands and thousands of papers that I have coauthored, which have been cited tens of thousands of times, you would call me an idiot, right? We give those prizes for discovery, not for being rich. The same thing is true of tenure too. You shouldn't be able to buy your role as a tenured professor. You should have to prove that you, personally, are capable of making a serious contribution to your field. And of course you demonstrate that capability by publishing papers.

So when a prof is automatically added as a coauthor to a paper that he or she did not contribute to in any way except financially, then she is trying to buy a reputation as a scholar, or the other perks like tenure or membership in the AAAS that come with that reputation in just the same kind of way that the absurd billionaire is doing.

Answer 1

No, automatic co-authorship is not ethical – irrespectively of the discipline!

The following is from the "DFG Proposals for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice" (pp.82f, emphasis added), which, for instance, strictly forbids "automatic" co-authorships and gives a couple of common negative examples:

Authors of an original scientific publication shall be all those, and only those, who have made significant contributions to the conception of studies or experiments, to the generation, analysis and interpretation of the data, and to preparing the manuscript, and who have consented to its publication, thereby assuming responsibility for it. [...] Therefore, the following contributions on their own are not sufficient to justify authorship:

• merely organisational responsibility for obtaining the funds for the research,

• providing standard investigation material,
• the training of staff in standard methods,
• merely technical work on data collection,
• merely technical support, such as only providing equipment or experimental animals,
• regularly providing datasets only,
• only reading the manuscript without substantial contributions to its content,
• directing an institution or working unit in which the publication originates

Help of this kind can be acknowledged in footnotes or in the foreword.

In fact, DFG (the German Research Council) requires you to sign strict adherence to this ethical code on each and every grant proposal. Other funding agencies have similar regulations.

Answer 2

Is this really common, and if so, in which fields?

I guess it is reasonably common in many fields. As a rule of thumb, it seems to me that the more applied a field is, the more likely you are to see groups where the lab head co-authors every or almost every paper in the lab. In my field (software engineering), I would say at least 50% - 75% of all groups operate like this. Academia.SE tells me that this is not the case e.g., in Theoretical CS.

Note that this does not necessarily mean that the lab head is added to each paper without contribution (although there are certainly groups where it means exactly that). In some cases, it is just that all research in a lab directly runs through the lab head (i.e., nobody works on research without the direct involvement of the lab head). In such cases, co-authorship on all papers may be academically warranted (but this might actually be the worse practice in reality, as it allows for no growth to independence at all for the PhD students and postdocs in the lab).

Is this really ethical?

I would argue that things are more complicated than you seem to think, mostly because the funding argument that you claim "holds no ice" is in fact not so bad. Your comparison with your parents having sex is pretty silly. Big research labs depend on senior researchers acquiring grant money. This takes a lot of time - time, that said researchers cannot use to write actual papers. Researchers on any level are mostly evaluated via papers. Under these circumstances, if senior researchers don't get a "kickback" on some level from the money they acquire, what would motivate them to write grant proposals in the first place?

There is also the added difficulty that in many STEM fields it is just darn difficult to decide whether somebody has made a contribution (see also here: What are the minimum contributions required for co-authorship). Is discussing ideas enough? What if all the important ideas and suggestions came from the advisor? Oftentimes, the research work of a PhD student is basically an implementation of a high-level plan laid out by the advisor in the funding proposal. In that case, has the advisor not by default "contributed" to all papers?

Answer 3

In fundamental mathematics, at least in France, the custom is for advisors never to co-author (important) papers with their students. If an advisor does coauthor a paper with a PhD student, then it is assumed that he or she had to help the student more than should be expected, and this can prevent the student from getting a job afterward.

This goes to the point of being arguably unethical in the opposite way than asked in the question, as most of the time advisors do have a role (if only of suggesting the question and the angle of attack) in PhD student papers.

Answer 4

The correct analogy to draw in fields where grant-writing is a critical aspect of the research is architecture: the act of preparing the grant is akin to doing the conceptual design of a new building; the work of the graduate students and postdocs (or other researchers) is the research equivalent of fleshing out the design into a practical design, and converting it into a real building. The master architect (the one overseeing the vision) is going to get a substantial amount of credit, regardless of not being the one to plan everything out to the finest detail. But the important thing is that the end product (the building in one case, the research in the other) would not result without the initial rough sketches for the specific project (the conceptual design or the grant proposal).

This is very different from the billionaire example provided above, because writing a grant requires the construction of a specific framework in which the research will be carried out, not just handing over money to others to do work within some grandiose but completely unspecific vision.

Now, as a further practical matter, very few advisors are "absentee landlords" who merely acquire the grant, and then do nothing else. They almost certainly don't run the code or perform the experiments, but they are active in helping to interpreting the data, design future experiments, and evaluating and editing the manuscripts that are produced. In part, this is a matter of safeguarding one's reputation: if you let people publish bad work under your name, your reputation will suffer as a result in the long run.

Answer 5

This depends on many factors, and there is no general answer. In a field like experimental particle physics, you can have a paper with 500 authors. These experiments are huge collaborations. For people doing theoretical work in the sciences, it's more common to have only one or two authors; the question is then whether the adviser made a significant contribution.

Yes, it does happen sometimes that people get added as coauthors when they shouldn't. At a lab where I once worked, the director of the lab got his name on every paper done by anybody at the lab, even if he had made no contribution. (His c.v. proudly listed his vast number of scientific publications.) I once had a coauthor who refused to read and comment on the paper before it was submitted, but who also wanted his name on it. He was backed by our PI, because he had done work on the experiment.

In the natural sciences, the norm is basically that if you made a significant contribution to the work, your name goes on the paper. Typically a grad student's adviser will make a significant contribution to any work the student carries out.

Answer 6

I doubt I have anything too original to say here, but I couldn't resist a chance to add my 2c. This might be the most fraught question in academia, as least if you are a student or a post-doc.

Is it ethical for advisors to automatically coauthor papers?

I assume that by advisor you are also including a postdocs PI, for example. So let us consider the question as this more general one. The basic answer in my opinion, is... No, of course, not.

I've seen various positions/justifications on/for this. They include:

1. That's just the way it is. The advisor provides the funding. Without him, you would have no funding, no job, and no paper. So be grateful. This might be described as the "capitalist justification" for this practice. Similar viewpoints are expressed to justify why capitalism and capitalists are good things.
2. Well, the advisor is providing value even if you don't think or know it. It is easy for a junior researcher to underestimate the value of an overarching research plan, and the value in discussion and the perspective of a senior researcher.
3. Well, the senior faculty need a payoff, or else why is it worth their while? This was expressed by @xLeitix for example.

That might be some value/validity in all these viewpoints, but I personally don't think that any of these is a justification for such practices.

As far as 1 goes, you can basically use the same justification for a sweatshop.

As far as 2, I think that the help provided by one individual spreading himself as thin as the kinds of people we are talking about do, is likely to be realistically very low, unless the person in question is very energetic and very talented. Such people are rare. Plus senior people don't usually have that kind of energy anyway. Also, research questions are just too hard, complicated, and non-obvious. You need to dig in. But you can't dig in 20 holes at the same time. Additionally, in the kind of complex multi-disciplinary areas that are getting more common these days, it is increasingly difficult to have a sufficiently broad skill-set to be able to keep up with more than a fraction of what is going on in a typical research lab.

My experience of mentors/advisors contributions is that their contributions tended to be useless/rubbish because they did not really understand the issues, either because they didn't have or didn't want to take the time, or their training had simply not equipped them to do so.

3 is really the hardest to respond to; I'm not sure I have a good response. However, it is not really a justification so much as a pragmatic observation.

So, to the subquestions

Is this really common, and if so, in which fields?

It is really hard to know this. You can't pass out a survey which includes a box to tick saying "yes, I'm a crook and fraud". However... @xLeitix writes

I guess it is reasonably common in many fields. As a rule of thumb, it seems to me that the more applied a field is, the more likely you are to see groups where the lab head co-authors every or almost every paper in the lab. In my field (software engineering), I would say at least 50% - 75% of all groups operate like this.

Based on my experience, I think this sounds pretty accurate, though I would not venture any percentages. I've worked in more theoretical fields, notably Math and Statistics, and in Biomed type fields; this kind of thing is much less common in the theoretical fields, and practically the norm in Biomed. In fact, I didn't see any of this in Math. I don't think this is because mathematicians are inherently any more virtuous than anyone else. I think it is because applied work just inherently has more overhead in practical terms than theoretical work, at least in the implementation end of the work. If a mathematician has an idea, he has to prove it, which may not be so easy, but once he has done that, he is basically done. In an applied area, if you have an idea, you are just getting started. You have to collect data and/or perform experiments, probably write some code, write the paper, make figures, etc. etc. So there is just more room for monkey work which a junior person can do.

If I am an applied researcher, I'm probably under immense pressure to perform, to get tenure, or maybe just keep my job. I could try to be good, and contribute to every paper that I am putting my name on, but given the immense overhead of applied work as described above, and also, given that your colleagues are probably happily abusing the system, there is immense temptation, I imagine, to abuse the system as well. Just to keep up.

In any case, in my experience, most people who do this seems to have completely internalized this behavior, and seem to take it for granted.

Is this really ethical?

No, of course not. Ultimately, my objections are really that of straight morality. I think it is just wrong. These practices are a form of fraud and a form of reputation/credit theft. Granted, in the grand scheme of things they are fairly minor offenses, but regardless...

I think Shane (the poster) makes a good point with his billionaire hypothesis.

Answer 7

I work in pure mathematics, where advisors are not co-authors unless they have significant input. My perception is that the convention the question speaks of occurs primarily in the laboratory sciences, so my point of view is that of an outsider

Nevertheless, I do not consider the practice unethical. First of all, there is no deception, because in those fields it is well-established convention that the last name on the paper is the lab PI, and other scientists reading the paper will recognize that she didn't contribute to the paper in the same way the first author did, but that the research was performed in her lab with her grant money.

Secondly, the lab PI doesn't just bring in the money, she also decides which direction the lab's research should focus on, and she often has to organize a large team of people- something that an advisor never has to do in say, mathematics. This is where the billionaire analogy breaks down. If your hypothetical benefactor also has to make decisions what equipment to buy, which skills to recruit in postdocs and grad students, and which (and how much) resources are worth pouring into which scientific questions, then yes, she deserves last author credit.

Thirdly (and I may be a little unfair in this point) my perception is that the standards of co-authorship are lower in the lab sciences compared to math and philosophy, e.g. people who perform tedious monkeying with equipment, or perform statistical analyses in data get their names on papers despite not contributing to the "thinking part" of the project. So if Joe who did nothing but mess with a spectrometer for a couple of days has his name as third author, then Susie who manages the lab should get her name on it too.

Answer 8

Answers to your question of the ethics of co-authorship need to consider what is the role of (or signal conveyed by) authorship in a publication. This role may 1) differ among disciplines and 2) be evolving all the time.

In the case of large research groups or collaborative projects—as some seen in genetics or physics—the roles of a head researcher involve managing the direction of the research and to create an environment where that research can thrive. The latter may involve obtaining funding, hiring post-docs & PhD students, managing people so research happens in a productive way. Whatever output from that group would probably not happen if it wasn't for the head researcher; in that sense, he/she has a very strong involvement in the creation of a research output. Good research heads will know very well where the different pieces/outputs fit in the overall research project, although they may not be familiar with the details of a calculation in a publication. They will guide provide post-docs and students so their publications fit within the overall project. In my book, this merits co-authorship in a publication.

In addition, there is co-authorship as a signal of group productivity, which is then used to improve the standing of the head researcher when it comes to funding application. This is a game played by many labs in the world; one may not agree with the 'corruption' of traditional authorship, but it is certainly used that way. Thus, I do not think we can discuss the ethics of co-authorship in a vacuum, without understanding its role in modern research practice.

Disclaimer: I do work in a small group, where there is no assumption of automatic co-authorship. I am, however, evaluated on the 'creation and support of research environment' when applying for academic promotion.

Answer 9

Any question involving the words "Automatic" and "Authorship" raises red flags for me, and my inclination is always to say "No".

From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which is the group that sets authorship guidelines not only for medical journals, but also many journals in closely related fields like public health:

Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications. Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work. The following recommendations are intended to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.

Automatic authorship doesn't confer either this responsibility, or imply that they've made substantive intellectual contributions to the papers. Their four suggested criteria is as follows:

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 Final approval of the version to be published; AND 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.

I think that in most cases an advisor should have met the first criteria, and should have met all the subsequent ones for papers with their name on it done by one of their students (otherwise, what exactly is the advisor doing besides signing the occasional form?), but it's entirely possible they haven't.

For example, in my dissertation, I have two papers that do not have my advisors name on them - one because it was a side musing born out of trying to graph a set of results, and pretty much the product of my own brain over the course of a week, and another because they felt they hadn't met those criteria.

Answer 10

I don't think one can claim this is ‘unethical’ in general.

We can (at least for the purpose of argument) take ‘unethical’ to mean ‘deceptive’, in which case ‘is automatic authorship unethical?’ can be read as ‘is automatic authorship deceptive?’ But that depends on who, in the readership, is being deceived, and different disciplines may ‘read’ the author list differently.

My presence in an author list may indicate a claim that:

1. I contributed to this paper, and my position in the list order reflects the importance of my contribution.
2. I contributed to this paper, and my position in the list reflects the alphabetisation of my name.
3. I contributed to this paper, and my position in the list represents the order in which the various authors first committed edits to the text in github.
4. I at least read this paper, and my inclusion in the list reflects the fact that I, along with 800 other people, was during the relevant period funded 50% or more of my time to work on this collaboration (actually, in this case you can't really tell whether or not I'm even aware the paper exists).
5. I'm aware of this paper (which happened in my lab) and am the PI who got the funding (I get the impression, as others have remarked, that this is common in biomedical fields).

As long as the readership of the paper parses the author list in the way I expect, then no-one has been deceived, even if someone from a different area, who parses author lists differently, would get the wrong impression, and might think I was claiming something I'm not (and therefore reproach me for being unethical in doing so).

So – I think the answer to the question ‘is “automatic authorship” unethical?’ is: it depends on what you mean by ‘automatic’, ‘authorship’ and ‘unethical’ (we can perhaps take ‘is’ as unproblematic), and depends crucially on what author and reader believe is being communicated by one's presence and location in an author list.

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I've written papers under each set of rules apart from the fifth. In one similar case, however (anecdote alert), I was on a five-author paper where almost all of the actual writing was done by the PI of the grant and me, in that order; the PI sequenced me first in the author list, then the second, third and fourth authors, then him last, to log the fact that he was the PI, even though you couldn't then tell how much he'd written. I didn't think this was very fair to him, but he asserted this was the norm in his discipline (a different area of physics).

Some disciplines seem to observe more than one of these parsing rules.

Of course, all of this means that bibliometrics which count things like ‘first-author papers’ are so errorprone as to be essentially pointless, for this as for so many other reasons.

Answer 11

First point to counter the "taking credits away": it is your choice to add an "author's contribution" chapter to your manuscript. If you feel pressure to put your supervisor or chief of lab you can do so. If they did not participate in your research, you can simply write "chief - responsible for project fundings". Two things can happen, the reviewers or the editor in chief reject this author for not participating enough. Then it is less pressure that you yourself offended your supervisor, who will later grade you. Or they do not care and the paper goes published, but with exactly this authors contribution. You always have the chance, to not even write this on your own. You can ask all coauthors to give you a summary of their contribution. Formulate that you consider this too sensitive to write on your own and sent to all co-authors. An "empty" co-author has to visibly lie in their response, which is a lot less likely to happen.

Also question yourself, if your supervisor is really not participating? If it is only 5 minutes per week discussion, but within the 5 minutes he/she prevents you with their knowledge from wasting 2 weeks on the wrong statistical method, there is no ethical conflict to grant and offer them co-authorship. If they never participate though it is unethical in my opinion. Regardless of the field. But strongly question yourself, how much has this person influenced your scientific thinking.