Integrity of Authorship and Peer Review Practices: Challenges and Opportunities for Improvement

Integrity of authorship and peer review practices are important considerations for ethical publishing. Criteria for authorship, as delineated in the guidelines by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), have undergone evolution over the decades, and now require fulfillment of four criteria, including the need to be able to take responsibility for all aspects of the manuscript in question. Although such updated authorship criteria were published nearly five years ago, still, many major medical and specialist journals have yet to revise their author instructions to conform to this. Inappropriate authorship practices may include gift, guest or ghost authorship. Existing literature suggests that such practices are still widely prevalent, especially in non-English speaking countries. Another emerging problem is that of peer review fraud, mostly by authors, but also rarely by handling editors. There is literature to suggest that a proportion of such fake peer review may be driven by the support of some unscrupulous external editing agencies. Such inappropriate practices with authorship malpractices or disagreement, or peer review fraud, have resulted in more than 600 retractions each, as identified on the retractions database of Retractionwatch.com. There is a need to generate greater awareness, especially in authors from non-English speaking regions of the world, about inappropriate authorship and unethical practices in peer review. Also, support of any external editing agency should be clearly disclosed by authors at the time of submission of a manuscript.