Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science

Group authorship, an excellent opportunity laced with ethical, legal and technical challenges

Group authorship (also known as corporate authorship, team authorship, consortium authorship) refers to attribution practices that use the name of a collective (be it team, group, project, corporation, or consortium) in the authorship byline. Data shows that group authorships are on the rise but thus far, in scholarly discussions about authorship, they have not gained much specific attention. Group authorship can minimize tensions within the group about authorship order and the criteria used for inclusion/exclusion of individual authors. However, current use of group authorships has drawbacks, such as ethical challenges associated with the attribution of credit and responsibilities, legal challenges regarding how copyrights are handled, and technical challenges related to the lack of persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as ORCID, for groups. We offer two recommendations: 1) Journals should develop and share context-specific and unambiguous guidelines for group authorship, for which they can use the four baseline requirements offered in this paper; 2) Using persistent identifiers for groups and consistent reporting of members' contributions should be facilitated through devising PIDs for groups and linking these to the ORCIDs of their individual contributors and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the published item.

Research anomalies in criminology: How serious? How extensive over time? And who was responsible?

A variety of ways to detect questionable research practices in small sample social science surveys have been discussed by a variety of authors. However, some of those approaches (e.g., GRIM test, SPRITE test) do not work well for results obtained from larger samples. Here several approaches for detecting anomalies in larger samples are presented and illustrated by an analysis of 78 journal articles in the area of criminology, 59 by Dr. Eric Stewart, published since 1998 with similar methods and/or authors, finding evidence that seven of the 59 articles have been retracted or corrected and of the remaining 52, nine (17.3%) featured at least one moderate anomaly while 38 (73.1%) featured at least one major or two moderate anomalies. Of all 59 articles, 28 (47.5%, p < .001, d = 0.94) had two or more major anomalies compared to none of the 19 control group articles. Furthermore, 22 (42.3%) of the 52 articles featured at least two major anomalies (p < .001, d = 0.89). It was also found that the larger the role of Dr. Stewart in article authorship, the greater the number of anomalies detected (p < .001, d = 1.01) while for his co-authors, there were few significant relationships between their roles and total anomalies. Our results demonstrate that extensive problematic results can remain undetected for decades despite several levels of peer review and other scientific controls; however, use of two types of control groups and the use of statistical methods for measuring and evaluating anomalies can improve detection.

The Many Chemists Who Could Have Proposed the Woodward-Hoffmann Rules But Didn't: The Organic Chemists Who Knew of the Smoking Guns

It is a reasonable question to ask, why, as of 1965 when the five Woodward-Hoffmann communications appeared, did no other organic chemist discover the orbital symmetry rules for pericyclic reactions? The previous two papers in this 27-paper series on the history of the Woodward-Hoffmann rules discussed the physical chemists, chemical physicists, and theoretical chemists who could have solved the pericyclic no-mechanism problem; and the organic chemists in whose laboratory many of the key hints to this problem were found but still did not solve the problem. The stories of 16 other chemists who knew of (at least portions of) the pericyclic no-mechanism problem are presented in this paper. Social, political, and scientific explanations are presented as partial rationalizations as to why none of these individuals - except Woodward with Hoffmann - solved the pericyclic no-mechanism problem.

Investigating the division of scientific labor using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

Contributorship statements were introduced by scholarly journals in the late 1990s to provide more details on the specific contributions made by authors to research papers. After more than a decade of idiosyncratic taxonomies by journals, a partnership between medical journals and standards organizations has led to the establishment, in 2015, of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), which provides a standardized set of 14 research contributions. Using the data from Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals over the 2017–2018 period (N = 30,054 papers), this paper analyzes how research contributions are divided across research teams, focusing on the association between division of labor and number of authors, and authors’ position and specific contributions. It also assesses whether some contributions are more likely to be performed in conjunction with others and examines how the new taxonomy provides greater insight into the gendered nature of labor division. The paper concludes with a discussion of results with respect to current issues in research evaluation, science policy, and responsible research practices.