Importance, definition and conflicts of authorship in scientific publications

Abstract

Defining authorship in scientific articles and documents is an essential and complex process that involves subjectivity and depends on largely informal agreements, which may cause conflict among researchers. Although some guidelines have been published to improve this practice, there are few quantitative procedures in the literature to specify authorship and co-authorship of a scientific paper, and there is no consensus on the definition of authors and the order in which they should be listed. With this article we try to review a few criteria and considerations for determining author lists in scientific articles.