Detection of inappropriate types of authorship using bibliometric approaches

Mazov N.A.

Gureyev V.N.

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics (ISSI2019)

№ / 2019

страницы: 885-895

Among a variety of types of scientists' misconduct, the problem of authorship is of special significance. Detection of such inappropriate types of authorship as guest, gift or ghost authorships implying fictive participation of one researcher or the absence in the byline of another researcher who had taken part in a study is one of the topical issues for the academic community to save and maintain integrity when carrying out research work and publishing its results. This study describes how bibliometric tools can be potentially used when detecting inappropriate types of authorship in research manuscripts. We believe that a certain distribution of publications is inherent at each stage of scientists' career progress. Significant deviations in a number of papers, co-authors, subject areas or set of journals in a certain period of work can be regarded as indicators of possible misconduct including, e.g., guest or honorary authorship. In this study, we used a set of prominent scientists of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences to reveal a correlation between career progress points and unexpected increase in scholarly output possibly achieved by means of unethical co-authorship.