Accountability in Research

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Authorship and justice: Credit and responsibility

Howard J. Curzer

To cite this article: Howard J. Curzer (2021) Authorship and justice: Credit and responsibility,
Accountability in Research, 28:1, 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/08989621.2020.1794855
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1794855

Published online: 22 Jul 2020.

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ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH
2021, VOL. 28, NO. 1, 1–22
https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1794855

Authorship and justice: Credit and responsibility

Howard J. Curzer
Philosophy Department, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Integra12 July 2020
Editors (ICMJE), those who make significant intellectual contri­
KEYWORDS
butions to a research project, and accept indirect responsibility Authorship; collaboration;
for the entirety of the work should be listed as authors. All ICMJE; publication ethics;
other contributors should be merely acknowledged. I argue credit; responsibility
that the ICMJE policy is unjust by consequentialist, deontolo­
gical, and common sense standards. Because different sorts of
contributions are incommensurable, ranking contributions is
usually impossible. In particular, privileging intellectual contri­
butions, and banishing non-intellectual contributions (e.g.
funding, administration, routine data collection) to the
Acknowledgments section is unfair to non-intellectual contri­
butors. Holding contributors responsible for the errors or mis­
conduct of others is also unjust. Contributors should be
blamed (and sometimes punished) for all and only their own
errors or misconduct. Their punishment should be proportional
to the harm done; their blame to the ease with which their
errors and misconduct could have been avoided. The ICMJE
policy goes wrong by using the outdated, overly constraining
practice of authorship as a vehicle for allocation of credit and
responsibility. My alternative policy would replace the author
byline and Acknowledgment sections of articles with
Contributors pages listing all contributors to the research pro­
ject, along with descriptions of their contributions.

Introduction
“We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need
for an author.” – M. Foucault

Who deserves credit for successful scientific research? Who is to be held

responsible for errors and research misconduct (fabrication, falsification,
plagiarism), as well as for lesser infractions of ethics? These are questions
of justice. Authorship is currently the vehicle for allocation of both benefits
and blame. Authors reap the credit for articles, and the blame (and punish­
ment for severe infractions) for errors or misconduct. Several influential

CONTACT Howard J. Curzer howard.curzer@ttu.edu Philosophy Department, Texas Tech University,

Lubbock, USA
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 H. J. CURZER

organizations have issued proposals for defining the roles of authors and
other contributors. I shall take the proposal by the International Committee
of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE 2017) to be my stalking horse, but my
criticisms will apply with equal force against many other current policies that
provide guidelines similar to ICMJE’s concerning the roles of authors and
contributors (e.g. AERA 2011; APA 2008; ASA 2020; COPE 2019; CSE 2012;
WAME 2007). I shall argue that the ICMJE proposal is unjust by consequen­
tialist, deontological, and my own (common sense) standards of justice.
I suggest that the ICMJE proposal goes wrong by continuing to utilize the
practice of authorship for the allocation of credit and responsibility. Just
allocation demands a new paradigm and an alternative policy.1

Background
A combination of two trends in scientific research has led to a sort of crisis.
The first trend is increasing research collaboration. Until the twentieth
century, scientists worked in comparative isolation from each other.
Scientists designed their own studies, executed these studies themselves,
and wrote up their own results. Author and researcher were the same person.
Gradually, scientists came to work in larger and larger teams, and more and
more articles had more and more coauthors. Now lone scientists and single-
author articles are rare (Greene 2007; Wray 2006, 507).
The second trend is the increasing importance of research for both
individuals and institutions. As research becomes more and more important,
scientific publication generates increasing rewards, and non-publication pro­
duces increasing losses. As we all know, a vita packed with numerous,
widely-cited, high-prestige publications yields job offers, tenure, salary
increases, awards, prestige, etc. Conversely, a vita lacking such publications
leads to career stagnation, higher teaching loads, and windowless offices.
These rewards and losses increasingly incentivize not only research, but also
research misconduct and sloppiness born of haste. The pressure to publish
has resulted in an explosion of cheating, and arguably an increased error rate
(Alberts et al. 2014; Anderson et al. 2007; Davis, Riske-Morris, and Diaz
2007). Responsibility for flawed work – who to blame (and sometimes
punish) – has become an increasingly important issue.
These two trends have caused author and researcher to come apart
(Biagioli 2000, 103). People listed on the byline of an article are not authors
in the traditional sense; instead, they are (usually) contributors to the
research program whose outcome is reported by the article. Sometimes
those who contribute to the research, and are therefore listed as authors,
do not contribute to the writing of the article. Conversely, some “editors”
who functionally write the article are not listed as authors. Moreover, as
multiple authorship becomes the norm, and authorship becomes increasingly
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 3

valuable, some people are listed as authors when they did not participate at
all in the research (gift authorship) (McClellan, Mansukhani, and Moe et al.
2019). Conversely, some people are not listed as authors despite significant
participation in the research (ghost authorship) (Jabbehdari and Walsh 2017;
Wislar et al. 2011). The practices of gift and ghost authorship further separate
author and researcher.
The disconnect between writer and researcher has made appropriate
assignment of credit and responsibility difficult and uncertain. Confusion
and conflict over who should be listed as an author is widespread (Teixeira
da Silva and Dobránszki 2016a, 97–122; De Vries, Anderson, and
Martinson 2006, 48–49; Smith, Williams-Jones, and Master et al. 2019;
Clement 2014, 346–347; Dance 2012). The ICMJE proposal is a natural
response to these historical trends. It has a descriptive side and
a prescriptive side.
Descriptive: By building on the familiar term “author,” the ICMJE proposal
implicitly asserts that, although there are a few differences, (a) the traditional
practice of authorship, (b) the current practice of authorship, and (c) the
practice of authorship enjoined by the ICMJE proposal are all similar enough
to be considered versions of the same practice.
Prescriptive: The ICMJE proposal stipulates how we should assign credit
and responsibility. It specifies who should qualify as an author. By prohibit­
ing problematic authorship assignments, the ICMJE proposal aims to rectify
as well as clarify the relationships among authorship, credit, and
responsibility.
Descriptive: The ICMJE proposal is out of touch. The disconnect between
writer and researcher has changed the practice of authorship so much that
the term, “author” is a misnomer. It is misleading to portray the way in
which credit and responsibility are currently assigned as continuous with the
earlier practice of authorship. The older practice is related to the new practice
of authorship in the way that a mom-and-pop grocery-and-variety store is
related to Walmart. That is, the contemporary practice is so different that it is
better understood as a new practice. Nor is the ICMJE proposal just
a tweaked version of the current practice of authorship. Although the
ICMJE proposal is widely, though not universally adopted by journals and
professional societies, it is widely, though not universally violated by
researchers (Smith and Master 2017, 244; Marušić, Bošnjak, and Jerončić
2011; Patience et al. 2019). The ICMJE proposal is given lip service, but not
followed, let alone enforced. The current practice of authorship, and the
practice of authorship enjoined by the ICMJE proposal are significantly
different.
Prescriptive: I shall argue that the ICMJE proposal’s embrace of the
practice of authorship distorts the allocation of credit and responsibility,
resulting in an unjust policy.
4 H. J. CURZER

The core of the ICMJE proposal

In a brief preamble, the aim of the ICMJE proposal is specified in the
following way:
The following recommendations are intended to ensure that contributors who
have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as
authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in
taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published (ICMJE 2017).

In the next section, the proposal continues:

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

● Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or

the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
● Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual
content; AND
● Final approval of the version to be published; AND
● Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring
that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the
work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an
author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific
other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the
integrity of the contributions of their co-authors. All those designated as authors
should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria
should be identified as authors …. These authorship criteria are intended to
reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take respon­
sibility for the work (ICMJE 2017).

In its concluding section, the proposal specifies who should be acknowl­

edged, rather than listed as an author:
Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should
not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Examples of activities
that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for author­
ship are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general
administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing,
and proofreading (ICMJE 2017).

The ICMJE proposal is short, but its pithiness does not preclude puzzles and
problems. Let me call attention to a few crucial points within the proposal.

(1) Since all and only people who meet the four criteria are to be authors,
both gift and ghost authorship are prohibited.
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 5

(2) While authorship and acknowledgment are both forms of credit,

authorship is by far the more important form of credit.
Acknowledgment is trivial by comparison. It brings none of the
benefits. The aim of the ICMJE proposal is to “ensure that contribu­
tors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper
are given credit as authors.” To be listed as an author, one must make
“contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisi­
tion, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work,” and participate
in “drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual
content.” Thus, non-trivial credit for research work is to be assigned
only to those who make intellectual contributions.2
(3) Unsurprisingly, each author is to be directly responsible for his or her
own contribution. Additionally, the ICMJE proposal stresses that
authors are also responsible for keeping track of which coauthors
make which contributions, for the integrity of their collaborators,
and for investigating any questions about accuracy or integrity of the
research. To encapsulate these responsibilities, I shall say that each
author is to be indirectly responsible (but not directly responsible) for
all of the work. In these ways, credit and responsibility for the whole
project are linked. Thus, non-trivial credit cannot be had without non-
trivial responsibility.
(4) People who make non-intellectual contributions such as providing
funds, equipment, supervision, administration, writing assistance of
various sorts, or (non-intellectual) labor3 are to be merely acknowl­
edged. These contributors are directly responsible for their own con­
tributions, but not indirectly responsible for other parts of the work.4

Starting points
I begin with two principles.

(A) Give credit where credit is due. All and only contributors to a project
should receive credit for all and only their contributions.
(B) Everyone (except young children, certain mentally ill people, and
duped or coerced agents) is responsible for all and only their own
actions.

Although vague, these principles seem to be reasonably straightforward,

common sense,5 unarguable principles. Yet as I shall show, the ICMJE
proposal violates both of these principles.6
Standards of justice can be derived as corollaries from more general moral
theories. Currently, most ethicists adhere to the moral theories of either
6 H. J. CURZER

consequentialism or deontology. Will an application of these theories to the

issue of allocation of credit and responsibility endorse the ICMJE proposal,
principle (A), and/or principle (B)? I shall show that neither moral theory
accepts the ICMJE proposal, and neither unequivocally accepts both princi­
ples (A) and (B).7

Consequentialism and credit

Consequentialism is a family of moral theories. The common goal of all
versions of consequentialism is to maximize overall utility (or minimize
disutility when one must choose among evils) (Mill 2001, 7).
Consequentialists disagree among themselves about what utility is. Some
say it is simply pleasure; others say it is desire-satisfaction; yet others say it
is flourishing life; and so on. Consequentialists also disagree about how to
maximize utility. Act consequentialists maintain that at every decision point
we should choose the option that would maximize utility. Rule consequenti­
alists maintain that such a constant focus on utility is cumbersome and
counterproductive. Instead, we should adopt a rule that, if widely followed,
would maximize utility, and then follow that rule even in the rare situations
when doing so would not maximize utility.8
When it comes to collaborations, consequentialists of all sorts seek to
maximize utility by incentivizing contribution. It is hard to know what policy
would most effectively incentivize contribution, however.9 Consequentialists
might endorse a policy of directly correlating benefit and contribution. That
is, they might endorse principle (A). Furthermore, since consequentialism
allows for the reduction of all sorts of goods to a common denominator,
consequentialists could, and probably would go beyond principle (A), and
allocate credit proportionally. The more one contributes to a common pro­
ject, the larger one’s share of the credit should be. This policy would not only
improve each particular scientific research project, but would generally
grease the wheels of the overall practice of scientific investigation.
The ICMJE proposal does nothing like this. It distributes significant credit
exclusively to intellectual contributors, passing over non-intellectual contri­
butors (e.g. workers, administrators, funders), no matter how large or crucial
their contributions. Thus, the ICMJE proposal violates principle (A) by
giving intellectual contributors too much credit, and non-intellectual con­
tributors too little. Since intellectual contributors get all of the credit for the
work, although they only make some of the contributions to the project, they
get credit for the contributions of others. To put it starkly, under the ICMJE
proposal intellectual contributors are inadvertent freeloaders, cheating the
other contributors of their due.
Furthermore, although the ICMJE proposal does not prohibit proportional
distribution of credit among the intellectual contributors, neither does it
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 7

require proportional distribution. It is compatible with the policy of assigning

almost all credit to the lead author, the policy of assigning equal credit to all
authors, even if their contributions are very unequal, and with many other
policies. Thus, the ICMJE proposal does not maximize utility.

Deontology and credit

Deontology is also a family of moral theories. Unlike consequentialists,
deontologists do not share a common goal, but only the view that certain
acts should be avoided and others performed, regardless of whether the
outcome is desirable. For example, deontologists agree that killing an inno­
cent person is wrong, even if doing so would save many innocent lives. As for
awarding credit, rather than specifying a single, morally correct practice,
deontologists specify boundary conditions on acceptable practices.
Discussing all versions of deontology would be a herculean task. I shall
limit myself to three: Kant, Nozick, and Rawls.
Kant offers two significantly different moral theories. I shall focus on the
theory often termed “respect for persons.”10 The ultimate principle of this
version of deontology is that one should respect the autonomy of persons –
refrain from impeding people’s ability to make free, informed choices (Kant
1981, 36). On this theory, so long as a method of sharing goods among
contributors does not involve autonomy violations, it will be morally accep­
table. The primary sorts of autonomy violations at stake in the allocation of
credit for scientific research are deception (lies and covert concealment of
crucial information), and coercion (force or threat of force). Deception
undermines autonomy by preventing informed choices. Coercion under­
mines autonomy because people who are forced to do something – people
who have no reasonable alternative – cannot be said to have freely chosen to
do that thing.
Nozick gets to the same boundary conditions – prohibition of deception
and coercion – via a theory of natural rights (Nozick 1974, ix, 152).
Many credit-allocation policies would pass Kantian and Nozickian muster.
So long as research teams and journal readers understand in advance and
freely agree to a certain way of distributing credit, a policy will be neither
deception nor coercion. The ICMJE policy of allocating credit to all and only
intellectual contributors would pass. Principle (A) would pass. Even just
crediting the head of the lab would pass. Of course, under many practices,
readers would not know who made which contribution, but they would know
that they did not know, and could make decisions accordingly. Although
lacking knowledge, they would not be victims of deception.
Both Rawls’s account of justice, and its application to credit-allocation
are complicated. Principles of distributive justice specify just allocation of
goods, including the good of credit in research. There are two basic
8 H. J. CURZER

approaches to distributive justice. (1) Outcome-based justice begins by

determining who deserves what, and then tries to ensure that those who
deserve goods receive them. Principle (A) is an example of outcome-based
justice. (2) Sometimes it is difficult, or even impossible to determine a just
outcome, yet a just process is available. If the child who divides the cake
chooses last, a fair division is incentivized. Principles of procedural justice
determine just processes to distribute goods, and whatever emerges from
such processes is just. Rawls proposes a principle of procedural justice for
the allocation of primary goods (things rational people want whatever their
conception of the good – rights, liberties, powers, opportunities, income,
wealth, and self-respect). Rawls’ principle is to ask whether a particular
policy would be agreed to by a hypothetical group of rational, non-envious,
risk-averse, self-interested people who are behind a veil of ignorance (i.e.
ignorant of their own current goals, natural abilities, or place in society).
According to Rawls, since this veil of ignorance prevents people from
skewing policies to their own advantage, any distribution scheme agreed
to by such people will be just. To what will they agree? Rawls answers that
behind the veil of ignorance, everyone would worry that they are actually
members of the least well off class. Being self-interested and risk-averse,
they would ensure that that class would be as little disadvantaged as
possible. Thus, in order to minimize possible disadvantages to themselves,
they would reject any policy which did not benefit members of the least well
off class in society as much, or more than members of better off classes
(Rawls 1971).
Rawls’ account of justice applies directly only to primary goods, but it
applies indirectly to credit. One of the most important ways in which
members of the least well off class are disadvantaged is that they lack
equal opportunities for college and post graduate education. Thus, they are
less likely than others to make intellectual contributions to research pro­
jects because of socially created obstacles. Since the ICMJE policy privi­
leges intellectual contributions in allocating research credit, and since
research credit is crucial to acquiring high-income, high-authority posi­
tions in STEM fields, the ICMJE policy exacerbates the disadvantages of
the least well off class. Thus, Rawls would not endorse the ICMJE policy.
To summarize, the ICMJE proposal straightforwardly violates principle
(A) by distributing significant credit exclusively to intellectual contributors.
Consequentialists and Rawls would reject the ICMJE proposal. They might
endorse principle (A). Everything depends upon the factual questions of
which policy would maximize utility, and which would benefit the least
well off class. By contrast, Kant and Nozick would allow both a policy
conforming to principle (A) and the ICMJE proposal, but they would also
allow any other credit-allocation policy so long as the participants give their
free, informed consent.
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 9

Taking principle (A) to be less than sacrosanct is a serious failing. Lots of

policies might maximize utility, and well-informed people can enter into all
sorts of agreements voluntarily and smiling. But ensuring that people get
their due ought to be a bedrock principle of justice.
I suggest that both moral theories and the ICMJE proposal go wrong in
two further ways. First, it is tempting for scientists to favor policies that
privilege intellectual contributors over other sorts of contributors. Scientists
are intellectual contributors, after all. But privileging intellectual contribu­
tions (or any sort of contributions) is problematic because contributions of
different sorts are incommensurable. Contra consequentialism, I maintain
that they cannot be reduced to a common denominator and weighed against
each other. In particular, intellectual contributions are not more important
than labor, donor, or administrative contributions. All of these are necessary;
all are deserving of credit; none are more deserving than the others.
Incommensurability infects even comparisons among intellectual contri­
butions. For example, suppose one scientist designs the study at a general
level while another works out how to gather the data. These different sorts of
intellectual contributions are apples and oranges.11
When contributors do make the same sort of contribution, their contribu­
tions can be compared. If one funder provides 2/3 of the resources, and
another funder provides 1/3, then clearly the former deserves twice as much
credit as the latter. Comparisons are harder, but still sometimes possible with
respect to intellectual contributions. But commensurability of contribution is
the exception rather than the rule.
Second, consequentialism and deontology go wrong with respect to why
people ought to get credit for their contributions. Contributors should not
get credit for their contribution in order to incentivize research, or respect
autonomy, or benefit the least well off class. Instead, contributors should get
credit because they deserve it. That is, distributive justice is intrinsically,
rather than instrumentally desirable.

Consequentialism and responsibility

Justice is concerned not only with the allocation of benefits and burdens
(distributive justice), but also with the allocation of blame and punishment
(retributive justice). In particular, a just policy must assign not only credit for
contributions to scientific research, but also responsibility for errors and
misconduct.
When disposing of the bath water, one must retain the baby. To maximize
utility with respect to responsibility, one must minimize not only errors and
misconduct, but also obstruction and disruption of scientific research. At
their limits, these two goals conflict. Intrusive surveillance and fearsome
deterrence reduces mistakes and cheating, but also hinders and disorders
10 H. J. CURZER

research. For consequentialists, the trick is to find a tradeoff that hits the
sweet spot – a policy that produces reasonably low rates of errors, miscon­
duct, obstruction, and disruption.
From the philosopher’s armchair, it is hard to know which policy would
maximize utility. In order to reduce confusion about who is responsible for
what, a single auditor might be designated as solely responsible for uncover­
ing errors and misconduct, and identifying the guilty parties. (e.g. Clement
2014, 357). On the other hand, in many situations, the way to maximize
utility is to pass over someone’s error or wrongdoing in silence, or even to
blame the innocent.
The policy which maximizes utility might turn out to conform to principle
(B), but even if it does, consequentialists would again be enjoining the right
policy for the wrong reason. Choosing a policy of responsibility-allocation
because it enhances utility is misguided. All and only those who commit
errors and/or misconduct should be blamed (and possibly punished) because
they deserve it. Like distributive justice, retributive justice is intrinsically
valuable. Hitting the sweet spot is not evidence of a policy’s justice, but
only of its usefulness.
Although many different policies might turn out to be best, some policies
can be ruled out, as they are obviously very far from the sweet spot. The
ICMJE proposal is clearly incompatible with principle (B), for it holds
intellectual contributors not only directly responsible for their own errors
and/or misconduct, but also indirectly responsible for the errors and mis­
conduct of other contributors. This would certainly encourage thorough
supervision which would, in turn, substantially reduce errors and miscon­
duct. However, contributors looking over each other’s shoulders would also
create a climate of suspicion, discouraging collaboration. This would have
huge negative impacts on research. Thus, consequentialists would clearly
reject the ICMJE proposal’s approach to the allocation of responsibility.

Deontology and responsibility

Neither Nozick nor Rawls offers an account of retributive justice, but the
account offered by Kantian respect for persons is comprehensive and
straightforward. Blaming innocent people is deception. Penalizing innocent
people is coercion. Only the guilty may be justly fired, fined, forced to retract,
or even reproved. By holding intellectual contributors indirectly responsible
for the whole work, the ICMJE proposal blames and penalizes some people
for the wrongs of others. Thus, the ICMJE proposal’s rejection of principle
(B) is unjust.12
Kantian respect for persons also insists that all of the guilty must be
blamed. Respecting autonomy requires not only refraining from coercion
and deception, but also treating people as free, rational choosers. Unless one
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 11

has clear evidence to the contrary, one should assume that people’s actions
stem from their own deliberate choices. Treating people as responsible for
their choices requires blaming (and sometimes punishing) them for their bad
choices. Unless we do this, we treat people as though their actions flowed
from instincts, passions, hormones – as though they were automata rather
than autonomous. Thus, Kant would reject the ICMJE proposal and accept
principle (B). He would assign blame to all and only those individuals who
commit errors and misconduct.
Although this account is fine as far as it goes, I suggest that it is insuffi­
ciently nuanced. First, Kant bifurcates the world into persons and things;
there are no degrees of personhood (Kant 35–36). Therefore, people are
either wholly responsible or wholly not responsible for their actions. But
retributive justice should allow for degrees of responsibility. Roughly speak­
ing, the harder it is to avoid an error or resist a misconduct, the less
responsible is the individual who fails. Blame should be proportionate to
the ease of avoidance.
Second, Kant takes no stand on the degree of punishment, but I suggest
that punishment should be assigned in proportion to the severity of the
errors or misconduct. Trivial and terrible failings deserve different
punishments.
Third, a research team is not just a heap of individuals. Teams typically
have structure. One sort of structure is that some members supervise others.
Colloquially, the supervisor is sometimes said to be responsible for errors
made by others through a sort of extension of agency. More precisely, no one
is responsible for the work of others. Supervisors are responsible for their
own work which is, of course, supervision. Poor supervision is blameworthy.
An oft-overlooked, yet common and important implication is this. When
people err, or get away with cheating because their supervisors provide
slipshod directions or negligent auditing, then the supervisors are responsible
for giving poor instruction, or performing inadequate reviewing.13

Interim summary
Consequentialists might, or might not accept principle (A): give credit where
credit is due. But consequentialists would certainly reject the ICMJE proposal
to give credit only to intellectual contributors because this proposal would
not maximize utility. Similarly, consequentialists might accept principle (B):
everyone should be responsible for all and only their own actions. But
consequentialists would certainly reject the ICMJE proposal’s insistence
that intellectual contributors are indirectly responsible for the whole work.
Kant would embrace principle (B), and thus would reject the ICMJE
proposal to make intellectual contributors indirectly responsible for the
contributions of everyone else. All three deontologists would accept principle
12 H. J. CURZER

(A), but while Kant and Nozick would accept the ICMJE proposal to credit
only intellectual contributors, Rawls would reject this proposal because it
further disadvantages the least well off class.

Separating from the status quo

The ICMJE proposal is unjust with respect to the assignment of both credit
and responsibility. I suggest that the ICMJE proposal goes astray by using the
practice of authorship. This practice crimps options and prevents precision.
Authorship allows only two options for allocating credit and responsibility:
the byline and the “Acknowledgment” section. But the contemporary world
requires a larger range of allocation options. We should start over and
describe a new policy.14
Practices have inertia. It is often difficult to envision, let alone accept
radical changes in existing practices. Since I am going to propose a radical
change, I must wean the reader gradually away from authorship. I begin by
showing that authorship is only distantly and tenuously connected to what
should be the focus of credit and responsibility.
First, the novel or newspaper article is the total product of a novelist or
journalist, but the scientific article is not the total product of a researcher.
The product of a researcher is the scientific advances plus the article describ­
ing the advance and the way in which the discovery was made. Thus, even
before the flood of coauthored scientific articles, authorship played
a different role in the sciences than in other fields. Novelists and journalists
do research in order to write. Scientists write in order to report their
research. This difference was seldom remarked when researcher and reporter
of that research were one. But though seldom separated in practice, they were
always separable in principle. As the number of researchers per project has
grown, the separation has become more visible. Increasingly, research teams
contain members who contribute much, but write little, and “editors” who
contribute little, but write much.
Second, many (though not all) scientific articles are reports of the method,
results, and significance of a research project, and/or arguments concerning that
research project (Medawar 1964). Though necessary, writing such articles is
almost an afterthought, a peripheral part of the overall project rather than the
core of the project. Thus, credit should be assigned for contribution to the project
as a whole, rather than merely for contribution to the writing of the article.
Third, authorship is not the only way in which credit and responsibility
can be assigned. If we look outside of the sciences for models of allocation of
credit and responsibility in group projects, we find a variety of methods.
There is no standard method. Consider a few examples.
Large public buildings are often named for a donor, and a plaque might
recognize a high-level administrator. Architects, contractors, and workers are
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 13

typically not mentioned. So donors receive major credit, administrators

receive minor credit, and everyone else (including those who make intellec­
tual contributions) receives no credit. Errors, negligence, and corruption are
never blamed on donors, and seldom on administrators; instead, the blame
falls on architects, contractors, or workers. Thus responsibility is divorced
from credit.
Organizations (businesses, academic departments, NGO’s, government
agencies, etc.) often list (i.e. credit) no one or everyone. All of the employees
or none are on the web site. By contrast, the distribution of responsibility is
far from transparent or standardized. When something goes wrong, the
perpetrator might be blamed, but sometimes it is a supervisor, CEO, or
just the least popular employee who is fired.
When a large project is completed (e.g. a charity meets its fundraising
goal, a battle is won), the person who spearheaded the project is given an
award. In the acceptance speech, awardees might recognize other contribu­
tors to the project, or offer a blanket acknowledgment of “the little people
who helped,” or even just accept all of the credit for the project, themselves.
Again, responsibility is variable.
To be clear, I am not recommending the replacement of authorship with
any of these practices. My point is just that there are many alternatives for
assigning credit and responsibility already in use. Our choice is not author­
ship or nothing.

My proposal: credit
I begin with principle (A): all contributors should receive credit for all and
only their own contributions. To achieve this despite widespread incom­
mensurability, all contributors should be listed, without ranking their respec­
tive contributions. In particular, I would not privilege intellectual
contributions over non-intellectual ones. This is easily accomplished.
Articles should replace the byline and the Acknowledgments section with
a link to a Contributors Page.15 Everyone who makes a significant contribu­
tion to a research project should be listed on that project’s Contributors
Page.16
My proposal falls between two clusters of views. Authorship: The ICMJE
proposal (a) allows only significant intellectual contributions and (b) their
values to be only vaguely specified on the byline of the article.
Contributorship: Conversely, other thinkers propose (~a) specifying all sig­
nificant contributions clearly, and (~b) assigning a value to each contribution
(perhaps a percentage of the total research project) on a Contributors Page
(e.g. Allen et al. 2014; Clement 2014).17 My proposal (~a) recommends
specifying all significant contributions clearly, but (b) rejects the assignment
of a specific value to each contribution.18
14 H. J. CURZER

Bylines pose pitfalls for unwary readers. Decoding bylines is a non-trivial

activity which can produce misunderstandings. The fact that different dis­
ciplines and cultures currently deploy different conventions for assigning
credit on the bylines of articles (Teixeira da Silva and Dobranszki 2016,
1466–1467) poses particular conundrums and conflicts when multidisciplin­
ary and/or multicultural research teams use bylines to display credit-
allocation (Smith 2017). By replacing bylines and Acknowledgment sections
with Contributors pages, my proposal would eliminate many of these con­
fusions and controversies.19
A glance at gift authorship highlights some additional ways in which my
proposal would be an improvement over the ICMJE proposal. The ICMJE
proposal treats all gift authorship as illegitimate without making any further
distinctions. That would make sense if all gift authorship was wrong for a single
reason – because it is deceptive, for example. Gift authorship is a statement that
the gift recipient made an intellectual contribution when in fact he or she
actually made none. Since it is crucial to know who made which intellectual
contributions when making decisions about tenure, promotion, pay raises,
awarding grants, etc., and when allocating blame for errors and misconduct,
gift authorship erodes the cooperation among researchers, editors, and aca­
demic decision-makers. Additionally, by baring others from making informed
choices about credit and blame, gift authorship erodes the autonomy of grant­
ing agencies, hiring committees, etc. who base their decisions upon authorship.
One common motive for gift authorship is to credit someone for
a significant, non-intellectual contribution (e.g. listing Nancy as an author
because she hosted the research in her lab). Since the only way to provide
non-trivial credit within the constraints of the ICMJE proposal is by bestow­
ing authorship, scientists often face a choice between unjustly providing no
credit for crucial, but non-intellectual contributions, and deceptively describ­
ing contributions as intellectual by listing the contributors as authors.
Another motive for gift authorship is to satisfy a demand for credit by
someone with power over the actual researchers (e.g. listing Betsy as an
author because otherwise she won’t write a letter of recommendation for
her postdoc) (Macfarlane 2017, 1206–1208). The former motive is an attempt
to give credit where credit is due within an overly constraining practice; the
latter is vile. By banning gift authorship, the ICMJE proposal treats these very
different motives as if they were equally problematic. Both are excluded
simply because they are deceptive.
My proposal would separate the two motives. It would allow people to give
credit where credit is due without deception while banning the extortion of
undeserved credit.
Objection #1: The proposed change is too radical; it would be overly
disruptive.
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 15

Reply: Although this is a radical change, it is hardly an impossible

one. Contributors pages are already in use; always for articles
with hundreds of authors; sometimes even for articles with
just a few authors.
Reply: Justice is important. Making the allocation of credit and
responsibility more just would justify a significant disruption
in the way things are done.
Objection #2: Lots of people can do the labor, perform the administration,
and provide the funding for most research projects, but only
a few people can make the required intellectual contributions.
Privileging intellectual contributions is, therefore, appropriate
because, unlike other sorts of contributions, intellectual con­
tributions are scarce resources.
Reply: Scarcity is irrelevant to just allocation of credit. Even if lots of
others could have made certain contributions, the people who
actually made those contributions should receive credit for
their contributions. Credit is not a product or service to be
allocated according to supply and demand, but rather
a documentation of an accomplishment.
Objection #3: Laborers and administrators receive wages, and funders
receive the warm glow that accompanies generous giving.
Thus, they are already compensated for their contribution.
Further compensation of credit would be otiose.
Reply: Intellectual contributors also receive both warm glows and
monetary compensation. The warm glows flow from contri­
buting to our understanding; the money is salary. The job of
most faculty members includes a research requirement along­
side teaching and service. Thus, a significant part of a faculty
member’s salary is payment for research.
Reply: Even if intellectual contributors received neither money nor
satisfaction, laborers, funders, and other non-intellectual con­
tributors would still deserve credit. Furthermore, since many
non-intellectual contributors (e.g. technicians) are hired at
least partially on the basis of experience, listing their contri­
butions on Contributors pages would provide useful detailed
documentation. Thus the receipt of various sorts of compen­
sation does not obviate the need to credit a person’s
contributions.
Objection #4: Acknowledgment is sufficient credit for non-intellectual
contributions.
Reply: To say that a trivial amount of credit is appropriate for a non-
intellectual contribution is to say that intellectual contribu­
tions are much more important than non-intellectual
16 H. J. CURZER

contributions. That comparison would be possible only if

intellectual and non-intellectual contributions were
commensurable.
Reply: Many non-intellectual contributions are crucial to the com­
pletion of a research project, and labeling a contribution both
necessary and trivial is absurd.

My proposal: responsibility
My proposal embraces principle (B): people are responsible for all and only
their own errors and misconduct. Punishment should be proportionate to the
degree of harm done. Blame should be inversely proportionate to the diffi­
culty of avoiding error or temptation to wrongdoing. In particular, in light of
the authority structure of research teams, supervisors are to be held respon­
sible for errors and misconduct of supervision.
How is this to be accomplished? Each name on the Contributors Page
should be accompanied by a description of that person’s contribution to the
project. By making it clear from the start who is responsible for what, my
proposal would facilitate the investigation of errors and misconduct. There
would be no mystery; “who done it” would be clear.
An advantage of my proposal is that it perfectly conforms to the widely
agreed-upon thesis that credit should not be had without responsibility. By
combining principles (A) and (B), my proposal ensures that everyone gets
credit and takes responsibility for all and only their own contributions. By
contrast, under the ICMJE proposal, intellectual contributors get credit for
the work of non-intellectual contributors without taking direct responsibility
for that work, and non-intellectual contributors take direct responsibility for
their own work without getting credit for it.

Objection #1: Describing contributions in detail on a Contributors Page

would produce a cumbersome proliferation of types of con­
tribution. Whereas scientists now simply list the articles they
have coauthored, the proposed policy would make it too
difficult to grasp scientists’ productivity from looking at
their vitas.
Reply: Individuals could replace the category of “articles authored”
on their vitas with the category of “contributions made.” Or
perhaps with a few categories (e.g. intellectual contributions,
labor, funding, supervision, administration). This is not
a herculean task.
Reply: A more fine-grained listing would actually make it easier to
comprehend scientists’ research programs.
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 17

Objection #2: We already blame and punish all and only the guilty.
Reply: Actually, we deviate from this policy in several ways. First,
there is a lot of scapegoating going on. The guilty escape
blame while innocents are accused and punished because, as
their responsibilities were undocumented, they have no way
of proving their innocence. Second, subordinates are some­
times considered wholly responsible for errors caused primar­
ily by faulty instruction and supervision. Third, supervisors
sometimes take responsibility for the errors or misconduct of
their subordinates, even when the supervisors did not con­
tribute to, and could not have detected them. My proposal
rules out all three of these actions.
Objection #3: To say that supervisors are responsible for the errors and
misconduct of their subordinates is no different from saying
(along with the ICMJE proposal) that intellectual contributors
are responsible for errors and misconduct by non-intellectual
contributors.
Reply: Some intellectual contributors are not supervisors, and some
supervisors are not intellectual contributors.
Objection #4: Groups can take actions that are not desired by any of their
members. For example, sometimes a compromise leaves
everyone at the committee meeting unhappy. None of the
members would have chosen the compromise, but the com­
mittee as a whole adopts it. This is collective action. Collective
agency allows groups to be responsible for errors and mis­
conduct qua group, even when none of the members are
individually responsible. Now a research team is a collective
agent. So it makes sense to hold the whole research team
responsible for errors or misconduct committed by only
some of its members (Wray 2006, 509–512).
Reply: Even when a team regularly engages in collective decision-
making, they don’t collectively deliberate about each particu­
lar choice. Errors or misconduct are almost always the pro­
ducts of individual mistakes or misconduct rather than group
blunders or conspiracy.
Objection #5: By requiring all intellectual contributors to sign off on the
final draft, vouch for each other’s integrity, and so on, the
ICMJE proposal reduces the likelihood of misconduct, and
makes it trivially easy to assign responsibility for misconduct.
Everyone is responsible, at least indirectly, for everything.
Reply: Demanding that each intellectual contributor guarantee the
work of the other intellectual contributors is not just ineffi­
cient, but actually hopelessly unrealistic. Researchers typically
18 H. J. CURZER

lack the knowledge, skills, or time to check the work of every­

one on the team.

Conclusion
I have argued that the ICMJE proposal for assigning credit and responsi­
bility for scientific research is unjust by the standards of consequentialism,
deontology, and my own, common sense standards. The ICMJE proposal
continues the current, unjust practice of giving approximately no credit
for non-intellectual contributions to a research project. By contrast, on my
proposal, all contributions are credited and described in detail, but because
of incommensurability, they are not ranked, except in the uncommon cases
where multiple contributions of the very same sort are made. The ICMJE
proposal unjustly makes all intellectual contributors indirectly responsible
for any member’s errors or misconduct. By contrast, on my proposal, all
and only guilty people are to be blamed. Their punishment should be
proportional to the harm done; their blame to the ease with which their
errors and misconduct could have been avoided. In particular, errors and
misconduct of subordinates are sometimes traceable to negligence on the
part of their supervisors, and my proposal would hold supervisors respon­
sible for their failures of supervision.

Notes
1. Admittedly, justice is only one of several features that are desirable in a policy allocat­
ing credit and responsibility. But it is a very important feature.
2. A third form of credit is to be footnoted for a narrow intellectual contribution. The
ICMJE proposal does not mention footnotes, and I too shall ignore them.
3. How interesting (and revealing) that the ICMJE proposal does not even mention those
who contribute mundane labor to the research project.
4. Although there are some variations in detail, these four points are agreed-upon by
many policy-making bodies and journals (Resnik et al. 2016). All of the policies listed
in the introduction include these points, except that rather than holding all authors
indirectly responsible for the work, WAME specifies that a single author should take
responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole.
5. For a discussion of the nature and origin of common sense, and its relationships to
morality and moral theories, see Gert (2004).
6. The ICMJE proposal contravenes common sense in other ways, too. Because the
ICMJE proposal stipulates that an author must meet all four criteria, a paper might
easily come into being without anyone qualifying as an author (Shaw 2011).
7. Virtue ethics is an up-and-coming moral theory, but I shall not discuss it here. As with
all philosophic theories, both consequentialism and deontology are quite complex and
admit of many variations. Here I shall offer only ruthlessly simplified applications of
these theories to the issues of credit and responsibility in scientific research. Hopefully,
 ACCOUNTABILITY IN RESEARCH 19

my remarks will provide a starting point for thinking about other, more sophisticate
applications of these theories.
8. Where Mill stands on these disputes is, itself, a matter of dispute among interpreters.
9. Act consequentialists are not opposed to policies. They understand policies as rules of
thumb – breakable, but to be broken only in extraordinary circumstances.
10. I shall not discuss Kant’s “principle of universal law” because I think it is fatally
undermined by the absence of a non-arbitrary procedure for formulating maxims.
11. Several thinkers have proposed ways to weight contributions (e.g. Clement 2014, 350-
355). All assume that contributions of different sorts are commensurable. For further
criticisms of quantitative ways of distributing authorship see Smith and Master (2017,
248-251). Smith observes that different research projects have different sorts of goals,
and suggests that the value of a contribution is a function of the type of goal of the
project (Smith 2017).
12. This requirement is hopelessly impractical as well as unjust (Teixeira da Silva and
Dobránszki 2016b, 1459-1461).
13. Responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so holding supervisors responsible does not
necessarily diminish the responsibility of individuals who made errors or committed
misconduct.
14. Following other thinkers, I shall call participants in research projects “contributors”
rather than “authors” (e.g. Rennie, Yank, and Emanuel 1997, 582). Hopefully, jet­
tisoning the preconceptions built into the term “author” will create psychological space
for new, more just ways of assigning credit and responsibility.
15. Some proposals retain the byline and Acknowledgments section, and add
a Contributors page (e.g. Smith 2017). However, we are not creating a practice ex
nihilo. The convention of authorship is already in place. Under a hybrid system,
readers would continue to pay attention to the byline, and ignore the Contributors
page.
16. An early proposal by Resnik (1997, 240-241) is similar to mine in several respects.
Resnick suggests that each discipline adopt a set of types of contribution (e.g. writing,
grant writing, data collection), and list contributors under these categories at the
beginning of each article. On Resnik’s proposal, everyone who makes a significant
contribution to the research project will be credited, the nature of their contribution
will be known, the extent to which they contribute to the project will not be specified,
and types of contribution will not be ranked. Resnik’s proposal differs from mine in
two ways. Resnik retains the term, “author” as one of the categories, and specifies that
authors “take final and full responsibility for their products,” while I jettison the term,
“author” as misleading, and maintain that each contributor is responsible only for his
or her own contribution to the project. If Resnik were to replace the term, “author”
with the term, “guarantor,” and dial back the responsibilities of guarantors, our
proposals would align.
17. Initially proposed by Resnik (1997, 582).
18. A proposal by Pennock initially seems similar to mine. Pennock’s basic idea is to credit all
contributors and describe their contributions on, “the model of the credits in a film.
Rather than a generic or vaguely differentiated list of ‘authors’ the credits should name the
participants together with their scientific responsibilities in the research project” (Pennock
1996, 387). Movie credits do not model my proposal, for they privilege some sorts of
contributions over others by the size of the print. Pennock’s proposal also privileges
certain sorts of contributors. First, Pennock implicitly limits credit to intellectual con­
tributors. Second, Pennock distinguishes (a) “principle investigators” from (b) other
intellectual contributors. They receive “primary overall credit and if error or fraud is
20 H. J. CURZER

discovered they will be the ones to hold accountable” (Pennock 1996, 387-388). Finally,
Pennock mentions (c) “consulting scientists” who “provided some expert advice or
professional service, for example, but who were not actively involved as researchers on
the project” (Pennock 1996, 388). These three moves bring Pennock’s proposal close to
the ICMJE proposal which relabels these people: (a) author, (b) contributor acknowledged
“under a single heading,” and (c) contributor merely acknowledged.
19. Smith’s proposal leaves it up to each multidisciplinary research team to negotiate
authorship-order, guided by four principles: desert according to contribution, fairness
in evaluation, transparency, and collegiality (Smith 2017). Unfortunately, her proposal
would undermine both transparency and collegiality. (a) When a general policy for
authorship-assignment is followed by everyone, the byline is informative. But on
Smith’s proposal, each team would be using its own idiosyncratic method of author­
ship-assignment, so readers would not be able to grasp who has done what by looking
at the byline. The byline lacks transparency. Since the Contributors page would be
doing all of the work, why bother with a byline at all? (b) Negotiating agreements on
authorship-assignment independent of any general policy would allow different people
to bring different values and priorities to the table with no method of adjudication –
a recipe for conflict. Furthermore, negotiations ungoverned by general policies are
fertile grounds for the inappropriate exercise of power and prejudice. Thus, requiring
teams to negotiate authorship-assignments in the absence of a general policy under­
mines collegiality.

Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Anne Epstein and Mirah Curzer for helping me think through several issues
addressed by this paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Howard J. Curzer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5006-8992

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