Female academics are more likely to have authorship disagreements when publishing their research than their male colleagues. That is according to a global survey of more than 5000 scientists, which also finds that women often feel that they receive less recognition for their work than they deserve.
Almost half of the respondents to the survey – conducted by researchers led by Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology – were from the natural sciences and engineering (which included physics). About a third, meanwhile, were biomedical scientists and a fifth came from the social sciences.
The authors of the study found that just over half of respondents (53.2%) have had a disagreement over who to list as authors on a paper as well as the order in which those names appear. Women, however, were 1.38 times more likely than men to have experienced a naming disagreement and 1.25 times more likely to have had a dispute about author order.
Natural sciences and engineering had the lowest proportion of female researchers but the largest difference in disputes, with women 1.5 times as likely as men to report a naming disagreement.
Authorship disputes are often rooted in perceptions of whether contributions have been recognised fairly. Female respondents were more likely to state that they distributed authorship fairly but that their colleagues were unfair in their practices. When asked about which authors – first, last or all – receive the most recognition, women were also more likely to report a gap between who is recognised and who should be.
This, the authors write, suggests dissatisfaction with the current status quo. “Disagreements may be more prevalent for women because they perceive the system as not recognizing those it should,” the authors write. Overall, women felt that they received less credit than they deserved while men were more likely to claim that they received more credit than they deserved.
Author hostility
Limiting further collaboration was the most common outcome of authorship disputes for both men and women. There are, however, differences in behaviour following disagreements. Women are more likely to have observed hostility, while men, according to the findings, are more likely to produce fraudulent research “to compete with or undermine the results of a colleague”. In natural sciences and engineering, men are twice as likely as women to undermine colleagues’ work during meetings or talks as payback for such disputes. Women miss out on high-profile awards and positions
Highlighting the importance of communication, respondents who said they discussed authorship issues during collaborative work had fewer disagreements. But the researchers found that men have a more “authoritarian” style when deciding authorship. Women are more likely to discuss authorship with co-authors at the beginning of the project while men are more likely to do so once a manuscript is ready to submit as well as deciding authorship positions without team consultation.
According to Sugimoto and colleagues, the result show that “implicit” and “idiosyncratic” social norms in science disadvantage those who are not part of the dominant social group. “Opaque authorship has understated gender inequities and consequently created a space where they can increase unchecked,” they write. “Transparency in authorship… is essential for achieving equity in scholarly communication.”
