Authorship criteria and the problem of its attribution in scholarly papers

Abstract

A complication of academic research, the emergence of new subject areas at the intersection of different scientific disciplines, increase in international collaboration are accompanied by an increase in the number of co-authors resulting in the problem of author attribution requiring the development of new approaches to detecting authors' roles and formation of new authorship criteria. The solution of the problem of authorship attribution should specify actual contribution of the scientist to preparing research and the paper, distinguish areas of responsibility of coauthors, and enable certain researchers to accumulate their own reputation capital. The current study presents a review of Russian and foreign approaches for solving this problem including the development of new sections in articles for naming persons who do not match authorship criteria and introduction of models of sequence order of authors. The paper also traces the main stages in the development of authorship criteria, describes the advantages and disadvantages of authorship model as compared to new contributorship model. Transition to the fractional calculation of the contribution of each participant of a research paper is believed to be promising implying significance of the author's position in the byline and an increased role of paper sections describing the specific contribution of each author.