Authorship is the currency of an academic career. Scientific publications have significant academic and financial implications. Several standard authorship guidelines exist, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) is the most popular amongst them. There are increasing concerns about the ethics of publications with the rise of inappropriate authorship. The most important reason appears to be a lack of knowledge and awareness of the authorship guidelines and what actions constitute unethical behaviors. There is a need to incorporate standard guidelines in medical curricula and conduct structured training and education programs for researchers across the board. The current perspective describes the significant concepts of appropriate and inappropriate authorship, and the possible measures being formulated to shape the future of authorship……..FULL TEXT

https://www.ijo.in/article.asp?issn=0301-4738;year=2021;volume=69;issue=1;spage=36;epage=41;aulast=Ali;type=0

COMMENTARY:

Lingam Gopal

This issue of the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology has an offbeat article on the concept of appropriate and inappropriate authorship.[1] The article details a list of criteria to define who can be an author and who cannot be. In practice, however, it is easier to define who should be an author in an article but less easy to define who cannot be an author. It is not always easy to quantify the degree of contribution and create a cutoff line to clearly label a person as being eligible or ineligible for authorship……

https://www.ijo.in/article.asp?issn=0301-4738;year=2021;volume=69;issue=1;spage=42;epage=42;aulast=Gopal

On the pretext of transparency, fair comparison, and objectivity, promotion and selection committees over the world use the number of papers published, impact factor of the publishing journal, number of citations, and the H-index as key indicators of academic performance. All these are quantitative and thus easily measurable parameters. As the well-known adage goes, what gets measured gets done. For those aiming for junior faculty positions, the only measure available is the number of papers published. This because neither are their papers expected to generate a meaningful number of citations, generally speaking, nor are they expected to have a high H-index at the beginning of their academic career. I am a constant witness to a flurry of papers by prospective candidates, which can number from a few scores to more than a hundred, all published in an astonishingly short timeframe. How do they do it? The answer is simple. They do it by wrangling a coauthorship somewhere in the middle of the publication process, the relevance of their research domain notwithstanding. The case for promotions and tenured positions is no different. Many of them are gifted by kind-hearted and generous friends………………..FULL TEXT

https://www.ijo.in/article.asp?issn=0301-4738;year=2021;volume=69;issue=1;spage=3;epage=4;aulast=Gupta