Who Gets Credit for a Scientific Paper? A New Framework Says Accountability Is Key

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), March 10, 2026. Led by Veronique Kiermer, PLOS Chief Scientific Officer.

Scientific authorship has a problem that everyone in academia knows about and no one has solved. Gift authorship -- adding a senior name to a paper for prestige rather than contribution. Ghost authorship -- omitting someone who did the work. Coercive authorship -- demanding inclusion as a condition for lab access or career advancement. These practices distort the scientific record, corrode trust, and disadvantage early-career researchers.

The root cause, according to a new article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that the scientific community lacks a shared set of principles for deciding who deserves authorship and what that authorship means. The existing guidelines vary widely across institutions and journals, and many fail to address the core question: who is accountable for the work?

A survey of inconsistency

The working group behind the article, led by PLOS Chief Scientific Officer Veronique Kiermer, reviewed authorship guidelines across top-tier U.S. research institutions (R1 universities) and major scientific journals. Their findings reveal a fragmented landscape.

At the time of their review in 2024, just 42% of R1 research institutions explicitly associated authorship credit with accountability for the research. The remaining majority either left the connection implicit or did not address it at all. Journal authorship guidelines showed similar variability in formulation and emphasis.

This inconsistency creates confusion. A researcher moving between institutions, or submitting to different journals, encounters different expectations for what authorship entails. In the absence of clear, widely shared norms, authorship decisions often default to power dynamics within research groups -- the very conditions under which gift, ghost, and coercive authorship flourish.

Three principles for responsible authorship

The working group proposes three interconnected principles as the foundation for what they call a responsible authorship culture.

Transparency means open, documented conversations within research teams about who is contributing what and how authorship will be determined. These discussions should happen early in a project, not after the manuscript is written, and should be revisited as contributions evolve.

Credit means that authorship accurately reflects the contributions people made. The group recommends transparent descriptions of contributions -- such as the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) system already adopted by many journals -- so readers can see who did what.

Accountability is the most consequential principle. The group argues that all who claim the credit implied by authorship must assume accountability for the research. This means standing behind the integrity of the work, not just the specific analyses or experiments one performed. Accountability, they argue, is what distinguishes a co-author from a contributor acknowledged in a footnote.

The principles are designed to address harmful practices identified in a 2017 National Academies report, including gift or honorific authorship, ghost authorship, and coercive authorship. By anchoring authorship in accountability, the framework makes it harder to justify adding names that are not willing to stand behind the work.

A heavyweight author list

The article carries weight partly through its own authorship. The co-authors include Magdalena Skipper, editor in chief of Nature; Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, editor in chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network; and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Many of the authors are also members of a working group convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity, and Trust.

The article is not an official publication of the National Academies or the Strategic Council, a distinction the authors note explicitly. But the involvement of editors from the world's most influential scientific journals signals that these principles could eventually be reflected in the submission guidelines that researchers encounter most frequently.

What the framework does not solve

Principles are not enforcement mechanisms. The framework proposes norms but does not specify consequences for violating them. Without institutional incentives -- or penalties -- the principles risk being aspirational documents that change behavior only among those already inclined to behave well.

The article also does not fully address the structural pressures that drive problematic authorship practices. In academic systems where hiring, promotion, and funding decisions are heavily influenced by publication counts and author position, the incentives to inflate author lists remain powerful regardless of what guidelines say. Changing authorship culture requires changing the incentive structures that reward it.

The framework is silent on the rapidly growing role of artificial intelligence in research. As AI tools contribute to data analysis, literature review, experimental design, and even manuscript drafting, the question of whether and how AI involvement should be reflected in authorship decisions will become increasingly urgent. The principles of transparency, credit, and accountability offer a starting point for that conversation but do not address it directly.

Cross-disciplinary variation is another challenge. Authorship norms in physics (where author lists can run to thousands) differ dramatically from those in the humanities (where single authorship remains common). A single set of principles may struggle to accommodate this diversity without becoming so abstract as to lose practical force.

Culture change, not just guideline change

Kiermer framed the proposal as building a culture rather than imposing rules, emphasizing that PLOS has long advocated for responsible authorship practices with appropriate credit and accountability. She added that a principle-based approach will stand the test of time as research practices continue to evolve.

The working group calls on research institutions, journals, and scholarly societies to adopt these principles. Whether that call is answered may depend less on the persuasiveness of the argument and more on whether the institutions most responsible for academic incentives -- funding agencies, tenure committees, university administrators -- are willing to align their reward structures with the principles being proposed.