Research journals have long been plagued with the problem of “honorary authorship,” whereby one or more of a paper’s authors is, say, the chair of the department who contributed little or nothing to its writing. Recently, we had two papers come in with a new twist: “honorary” authors who hadn’t even been told of the paper’s existence!
Our Manuscript Central system uncovered both instances. Correspondingg authors may not realize it, but MC automatically notifies all authors when a paper is submitted under their name. The two innocent individuals involved acted honorably and immediately informed us of the situations. No reputable journal will touch a paper with its authorship in question, so both papers were summarily rejected.
JAWRA guidelines clearly state, “All authors of a paper are expected to have contributed substantially to its production and to be knowledgeable about the entire paper.” I don’t know why the corresponding authors acted the way they did, and won’t speculate on their motives. The results were clearly disasterous for their paper’s publication, and only a good detection system saved them and JAWRA from possible future embarassment.
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