Quantifying authorship: A comparison of authorship rubrics from five disciplines.

Transparency in authorship is a continuing topic in information science and scholarly communication. The process of determining authorship order in multi‐author publications, however, can be complicated. Authorship rubrics helping teams arrive at authorship order exist, but the extent to which certain roles are quantified (or not) and rewarded with authorship is unclear. This study examines eight authorship rubrics from five disciplines in the sciences and social sciences and evaluates their alignment with the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) framework; authorship rubrics are also compared on how they assign authorship credit and determine authorship order. Findings indicate that work on the methodology and the initial writing of the manuscript are most consistently quantified in authorship rubrics across the disciplines. Procedures for awarding authorship credit vary widely and methods for tie‐breaking rubric scores range from systematic to arbitrary. These findings suggest that regardless of discipline, contributions to carrying out and writing up research are seen as criteria for authorship. Differences in procedures for ordering authors may result, however, in different author order based on the chosen rubric. Ultimately, the fitness of use for authorship rubrics should be carefully considered by members of research teams, especially if the teams are comprised of interdisciplinary members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]