Influences on Authorship Issues: An Evaluation of Giving Credit

A survey on authorship issues was conducted with academic chemists in Ph. D.-granting institutions in the United States. Six hundred faculty members responded. The respondents reported a wide range in their attitudes and behavior regarding giving credit in a publication. The various guidelines for authorship are independent of academic background factors such as the relationship between the senior author and the contributor-potential author. However, the survey data reveal significant context-dependency by the respondents. Many respondents would give more credit to their own student than to another professor's student for the exact same contribution to a research project. The survey data further shows that the faculty who received their Ph. D. in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s are the most likely to provide authorship, while those who received their Ph. D. in the 1990s and 2000s would most likely give either no credit or acknowledgments.