Arbitrage opportunities in publication and ghost authors

TL;DR

The paper discusses how certain research evaluation systems incentivize ghost authorship and co-author arbitrage, where authors manipulate co-authorship to artificially inflate article credit without changing content.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of arbitrage in academic publishing, highlighting how authors can exploit valuation systems to increase credit through strategic co-authorship.

Findings

Co-authorship can be manipulated to increase article credit.

Arbitrage opportunities arise from valuation systems favoring more co-authors.

Potential for widespread gaming of authorship credit exists.

Abstract

In some research evaluation systems, credit awarded to an article depends on the number of co-authors on the article with total credit to the article increasing with the number of co-authors. There are many examples of such evaluation systems (e.g., the United States National Research Council evaluation of graduate programs gave full credit to each co-author). Such credit systems run the risk of encouraging ghost or honorary authorships. In a recent article, Antonio Osorio and Lutz Bornmann (2019) propose a scheme to discourage ghost authorships but increase the total credit to a paper when co-authorships increase. It is shown that if articles are valued more highly as the number of co-authorships increases, then there are opportunities to increase credit by mutually agreeing to add each other as authors. Unrelated authors of unrelated papers may all benefit by expanding their co-author list. I call this phenomena arbitrage--a term borrowed from economics and finance--since the content of the articles do not change, but the value increases by moving to a "market" of more co-authors where articles are valued differently.