Abstract
Accountability is the buzzword and managing philosophy of higher education administration nowadays. The performance of faculty scholars is evaluated on their productivity in scholarship and refereed journal article publication, especially in prestigious journals, as employees of their universities. Authorship in journals becomes an important criterion in receiving credit for merit and promotion. Graduate students also are expected to have their own publications prior to graduation to compete for faculty positions. Research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. Grant-funded and large scale longitudinal projects are complex and involve many people. Yet receiving acknowledgments in an article is not counted for anything in merit or promotion review. So both graduate students and faculty want to obtain authorship credit if they contribute a substantial amount of labor in the manuscript. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) also received complaints about disputes on authorship. In Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), we do not allow change of authorship after the article is accepted even if written consent from all parties are given. But the authorship issue is more than just the final authorship order in publication. How to establish an authorship attribution standard that is fair and can be adopted in our field while acknowledging the complexity of research and meeting the administration’s demand for accountability of intellectual labor should be a topic for scholars to consider. The path to full transparency in authorship is not easy and authorship affects every scholar’s academic career. How not to overrepresent and underrepresent contribution is the challenge for authorship transparency. Hence, I organized this forum on authorship transparency in an era of accountability.
In this forum, I invited five essays from senior scholars and journal editors from critical and quantitative perspectives to discuss this topic based on their research and experience. We begin the forum with the essay from Robert Kerr of the University of Oklahoma, who notes the increasing number of coauthors in journal articles in the field and advocates for more authorship transparency in journal articles. Then Claes de Vreese, who is the editor of Political Communication from the University of Amsterdam, contributes his take on this issue and experience in doing large-scale projects in political communication. Rob Logan of the National Library of Medicine and Emeritus Professor at the Missouri School of Journalism then responded from his experience in health communication and suggested our field consider adopting the standards set within biomedical research. Linda Steiner of the University of Maryland, the current editor of Journalism and Communication Monographs and former editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication, reviewed the definition of authorship and discussed what it means to be an author and coauthor. The forum is concluded with suggestions from Geri Pearson and Charon Pierson as representatives of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for colleagues in our field to consider.
Enjoy this forum and write to me if you have a suggested authorship standard for JMCQ to consider.