Ghost authors exist in academia.

Inside Higher Ed reports.

Who Gets Credit?

CHICAGO — If you are reading a research paper, and scan the authors (in some disciplines, an increasingly long list), do you know who played a meaningful role in the work?

Probably not, according to research released here Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. It’s quite likely you are regularly seeing names among those listed as authors who didn’t meet some criteria for scholarly authorship. And it’s even more likely that there are people — uncredited graduate students and technicians, but also professors — who for various reasons are not named.

Research by John P. Walsh, a professor of public policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Sahra Jabbehdari, who recently completed a master’s degree there, found that 33 percent of scholarly papers in the biological, physical or social sciences had at least one “guest” author, or someone whose contribution did not meet some definitions for co-authorship. And 55 percent of papers had at least one “ghost” author, someone who made significant contributions but was not named.

Walsh and Jabbehdari’s findings are based on a survey of the lead authors of scholarly papers — with 2,300 authors responding. (Lead authors were identified because they were listed as the contact person, or, where no contact was provided, because they were the first authors listed in disciplines that follow that convention for lead authors or the last authors listed in disciplines using that convention.) The papers covered a range of disciplines, a range of numbers of authors, and a range of highly cited and not cited at all.

The new paper’s authors found not only significant use of guests and ghosts, but wide variation by disciplines.