Ghost authorship: Editor's Role

[Guest guest]

Vigilant review of the manuscript by members of the editorial board/Reviewers can help to detect many cases of disputed authorship.

How ? Let's have a look.

In some cases it may be readily seen that a particular paper may not have applied the correct criteria. For example, it may be considered very unlikely that 12 authors would all have made a significant contribution to the writing of a case report—and it would be reasonable for an editor to suspect that some authors may have been included as "guest" authors.

Similarly a complex study involving clinical, epidemiological, laboratory, sociological, and statistical expertise is unlikely to have been conducted by any less than four or five researchers. If only two authors are included on a paper from such a study, doubts may be raised whether this was in fact correct or whether some "ghost" authors had been removed.

Finally consider a paper that describes the use of complex technology to characterize an organism from a developing country—and only one of the 12 authors is from that country. It is highly probable that this person is a "gofer" author whose role was to collect specimens and arrange shipment overseas to a laboratory in the developed world, but who played no part in the other more intellectual parts of the study.

According to the ICJME, activities that do not merit authorship include "acquisition of funding, collection of data or specimens, and general supervision of research groups"

Reference: R. Mason. Guests, ghosts and gofers. J Infect Developing Countries 2008; 2(2):78-80.

Dr. Smita Sontakke