Authorship Credit and Ethical Guidelines

Abstract

This article examines the literature concerning problems in the assignment of authorship credits resulting from collaborative research within and between psychological, counseling, and medical professions. In addition to previously cited reasons for the proliferation of multiauthored articles, we argue that the determination of authorship is correlated with the ethical standards of the professional organization to which a researcher belongs. Thus, possible conflicts between collaborators can spring from two sources: (a) ambiguous language regarding authorship in an ethical code within a discipline and (b) lack of guidelines for working across disciplines, especially if individual collaborators have competing goals and expectations.