The DOI matches its Crossref record; 244 of the 246 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A review of the literature on ethical issues related to scientific authorship
Open accessAbstract
The article at hand presents the results of a literature review on the ethical issues related to scientific authorship. These issues are understood as questions and/or concerns about obligations, values or virtues in relation to reporting, authorship and publication of research results. For this purpose, the Web of Science core collection was searched for English resources published between 1945 and 2018, and a total of 324 items were analyzed. Based on the review of the documents, ten ethical themes have been identified, some of which entail several ethical issues. Ranked on the basis of their frequency of occurrence these themes are: 1) attribution, 2) violations of the norms of authorship, 3) bias, 4) responsibility and accountability, 5) authorship order, 6) citations and referencing, 7) definition of authorship, 8) publication strategy, 9) originality, and 10) sanctions. In mapping these themes, the current article explores major ethical issue and provides a critical discussion about the application of codes of conduct, various understandings of culture, and contributing factors to unethical behavior.
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“Bias mostly occurs unintentionally (i.e., subconsciously); for example, when a scientist underpowers a study or is not aware of sexist assumptions that underpin their interpretive framework [48–52].”
From Autonomous artificial intelligence, scientific research, and human values (2026) · cites this paper as [48]
Citations
Cites
Southwestern Social Science Association (2010) · Social Science Quarterly · doi:10.1111/(issn)1540-6237 · Cited by 13,619
Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications
Fang, F. C., Steen, R. G., & Casadevall, A. (2012) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1212247109 · Cited by 1,232 · cited 1×
“In fact, training programs and researcher education are often mentioned as effective solutions for preventing violations (Benos et al. 2005; Arda 2012; Fang et al. 2012; Cabral et al. 2015).”
BackgroundJournal of the Pakistan Medical Association
Pakistan Medical Association (2020) · Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association · doi:10.5455/jpma · Cited by 1,047
Kilkenny, C., Parsons, N., Kadyszewski, E., Festing, M. F. W., Cuthill, I. C., Fry, D., Hutton, J., & Altman, D. G. (2009) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007824 · Cited by 860
Publication bias: evidence of delayed publication in a cohort study of clinical research projects
Stern, J. M., & Simes, R. J. (1997) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.315.7109.640 · Cited by 818
McSherry, B., & Duke, J. (1999) · Cited by 737
Cronin, B. (2001) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.1097 · Cited by 500
Wicherts, J. M., Bakker, M., & Molenaar, D. (2011) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026828 · Cited by 424
Marušić, A., Bošnjak, L., & Jerončić, A. (2011) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023477 · Cited by 418
McNutt, M. K., Bradford, M., Drazen, J. M., Hanson, B., Howard, B., Jamieson, K. H., Kiermer, V., Marcus, E., Pope, B. K., Schekman, R., et al. (2018) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1715374115 · Cited by 392
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- Agoramoorthy, G. 2014. “Truthfulness: The Ultimate Ethics in Scientific Writing.” Current Science 107 (11): 1777–1778.
- Andersen, J. P., J. W. Schneider, and M. W. Nielsen. 2016. “Mapping the Author Gender-Distribution of Disease-Specific Medical Research.” In 21st International Conference On Science And Technology Indicators (STI 2016), Edited by I. Rafols, J. Molas Gallart, E. CastroMartinez, and R. Woolley, 852–862. CAMINO VERA S-N, Valencia, Spain: Univ Politecnica Valencia.
- Garfield, E. 1982. “More On The Ethics Of Scientific Publication - Abuses Of Authorship Attribution And Citation Amnesia Undermine The Reward System Of Science..” Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences 30 (10): 5–10.
- Interrante, L. V., and E. Reichmanis. 2005. “Ethics of Scientific Publication.” Chemical & Engineering News 83 (26): 4–5.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
An Ethical Exploration of Increased Average Number of Authors Per Publication
Hosseini, M., Lewis, J., Zwart, H., & Gordijn, B. (2022) · Science and Engineering Ethics · doi:10.1007/s11948-021-00352-3 · Cited by 50
Self-citationHuman‐ and AI ‐based authorship: Principles and ethics
da Silva, J. A. T., & Tsigaris, P. (2023) · Learned Publishing · doi:10.1002/leap.1547 · Cited by 40
Guidance needed for using artificial intelligence to screen journal submissions for misconduct
Hosseini, M., & Resnik, D. B. (2025) · Research Ethics · doi:10.1177/17470161241254052 · Cited by 33
“For example, current AI tools can detect plagiarism of words but not other types of plagiarism, such as misappropriation of data, ideas, methods, arguments, images, tables, or unique forms of expression (Hosseini and Gordijn, 2020).”
Self-citationGoddiksen, M. P., Johansen, M. W., Armond, A. C. V., Clavien, C., Hogan, L., Kovács, N., Merit, M. T., Olsson, I. A. S., Quinn, U., Santos, J., et al. (2023) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0280018 · Cited by 44
A grey zone for bibliometrics: publications indexed in Web of Science as anonymous
Shamsi, A., da Silva, R. C., Wang, T., Raju, N. V., & Santos-d’Amorim, K. (2022) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-022-04494-4 · Cited by 33
Metadata
- Authors
- Hosseini, M., & Gordijn, B.
- Affiliations
- Dublin City University (IE)
- Corresponding author
- Hosseini, Mohammad
- Venue
- Accountability in Research
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2020-04-16
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 284-324
- ISSN
- 0898-9621 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-5815
- OpenAlex
- W3014226787
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 246
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 4
- FWCI
- 0.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doras.dcu.ie
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-sa
- Locations
- Accountability in Research (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Dublin City University Open Access Institutional Repository (Dublin City University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- Arrow@dit (Dublin Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- European Commission (741782)
- University of Hong Kong
- Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (741782)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Keywords
- scientific authorship, research ethics, authorship norms, attribution, authorship order, publication ethics, citation practices, originality, codes of conduct, research bias
- MeSH terms
- Authorship, Humans, Periodicals as Topic, Punishment, Plagiarism, Scientific Misconduct, Guidelines as Topic, Ethics, Research
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