Supervisors claiming co-authorship of PhD papers ‘form of fraud’

The tradition of PhD students publishing their first paper with their supervisor must be revisited to stop “co-authorship fraud” in which early career researchers are routinely required to trade publication credits for access to jobs and academic networks, according to a new study.

Drawing on interviews with early career academics in the UK, Hong Kong and Canada, the Studies in Higher Education paper identified four types of “unethical co-authorship” faced by junior researchers which, it argues, “embed a culture of misappropriation of authorship credit in academic life” but are often viewed as a “normalised rite of passage” for PhD students.

Among the practices described by interviewees are “power gifting”, in which senior academics “who do not make any or, at best, only a minimal contribution short of authorship” are listed as an author, and “power ordering”, which sees senior academics assume first authorship despite early career academics (ECAs) having done the majority of the work and intellectual labour.

In addition, “crony gifting” and “crony ordering” saw authorship or preferable listings awarded to a close colleague of the true author even if they had minimal or no involvement in a paper. That trade is made in the expectation that a individual may reciprocate with favours at a later point in time, such as providing letters of recommendation or postdoctoral research posts, according to the paper titled “Co-authorship as a traded commodity: the experiences of early career education academics in Hong Kong, Canada and the UK”.

Interviewees explained that they had been coerced into handing out authorship but, in some cases, justified the practice on the grounds of collegiality or altruism, arguing that authorship gifting might help secure promotion or tenure for a colleague, explains the paper.

“These four forms of co-authorship abuse may be understood as the price that ECAs pay for gaining a foothold on the academic career ladder,” the article explains, adding: “They are required, in effect, to trade away authorial credit and priority to supervisors and their cronies.”

The study also highlights the practice of PhD students publishing with their supervisors in the belief that “co-authorship with an established scholar with an existing network may mean that any joint publications will attract more citations”.

That short-term gain may, however, be “deleterious” for a PhD student in the long term because more established academics “tend to get more credit than less well-known authors in multi-authored work”, says the paper. “If a doctoral student has shared credit for their original work with an undeserving but better-known co-author early in their career, later on, they may not be sufficiently credited, through recognition and/or promotion,” it says.

Speaking to Times Higher Education, the study’s lead author Bruce Macfarlane, who wrote the paper with his Education University of Hong Kong colleague Jason Yeung-Tarre, said the widespread practice of research supervisors featuring on their students’ first papers “definitely needs to be challenged”.

“The worst cases involve free-riding supervisors making themselves the first author with the student second, down the list or excluded altogether. It’s an embedded cultural practice in many parts of the academic world but this does not make it right,” said Macfarlane, noting that it was a “breach of the accepted international co-authorship norms as laid out by the Vancouver protocol”.

While universities and research organisations have adopted this protocol in their research ethics statements, they had “largely failed to follow up effectively through training and development”, continued Macfarlane, who is dean of his university’s education faculty. “This is badly needed to protect early career academics from authorship theft,” he said.

Although the practice of a PhD supervisor adding their name to a student’s paper “might appear harmless”, it was still a “form of fraud”, he continued.

This type of “authorship fraud” is “even encouraged within some institutions as evidence that research supervisors are doing a good job in helping their students to publish”, Macfarlane explained.

“In East Asia it has become more common for young and inexperienced students to do a PhD by publication rather than a traditional PhD. This has made the problem worse as their focus is getting papers published rather than doing a traditional thesis,” he said on what he called “a way for supervisors to fatten their publication record through abuse of their power and free ride off their students”.

“It masks and misleads others about who the true expert is,” said Macfarlane on what he called an “ethical scandal that lies in plain sight which too many universities have chosen to ignore for too long and brush under the carpet”.

“There badly needs to be some intellectual leadership shown to challenge this and change mindsets,” he said.

“Supervising a PhD student is a privilege and responsibility. It is part of normal workload,” concluded Macfarlane, adding: “It does not give them any automatic right for a supervisor to become an author based on their student’s work. Unfortunately a lot of academics think it does.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com