Autorship consciousness. Unpacking power dynamics and inequalities in research

This presentation aims to explore authorship from the point of view of power relations in academic research, with a specific focus on publications. More specifically, it considers authorship from three perspectives. First, it looks at authorship as a bibliometric construction which allows for a quantitative evaluation of the production of researchers in a competitive context. Second, it examines authorship as the result of an actual scientific work produced by researchers, in which power relations and labor division may replay societal and cultural inequalities. Finally, it probes the notion of authorship in relation to a series of professional standards and criteria. In this context, we show that authorship as a bibliometric construction generates different types of misconduct or equity issues. These can be contextualized considering social and professional inequalities and how they may influence the probability of being cited, published, and/or credited as an author. The presentation concludes by hinting at possible solutions that formulate new authorship principles and evaluation criteria, which can be used to challenge the status quo.