So being new to the whole publishing thing, but hopefully entering into it for the long term (as I intend to be a Computer Science professor), I have never thought about authorship. I have two main questions:
- What should an individual be expected to do to be included as an authro of some intellectual property?
- What actually determines who is listed (and in what order, since this seems to communicate information)?
When I googled (yes I actually use it as a verb because it’s the only search i seem to use, not sure how I feel about that…) authorship, to make sure I was using it correctly in describing this issue that I am contemplating, the first result was to the Harvard Med School’s Authorship Guidelines. I plan to read a bunch of such guidelines to think about what people generally expect and what is actually practiced. It seems like it’d be a form of plagiarism to approach authorship in some ways.
This feels very similar to grade inflation. I will probably be writing a paper on grade inflation for my Preparing the Future Professoriate class.