Academic Authorship

Prerequisites

Prerequisite	Importance	Skill Level	Notes
Open Research	Helpful	Beginner	None

Fig. 87 Illustration about acknowledging contributions in academic articles. The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807.

Summary

This chapter sets out information about academic authorship traditions in different disciplines, which people are traditionally considered to be “authors”, how practices concerning authorship are changing, and how you might go about trying to achieve the authorship model you want to use.

Motivation and Background

The academic landscape is rapidly changing in favour of research projects involving large collaborations and interdisciplinary teams. This makes decisions concerning academic authorship hard to navigate and especially the need to consider different types of contributions fairly. Consequently, there is a shift in how researchers are thinking about assigning authorship for research outputs and what types of contributions are recognised and therefore valued.