By Imdadullah Mohammadzai and Waseem Hassan :
The global analysis of (a) 42,580 neuroscience and psychology papers, (b) a review of 142,576 radiology articles, and (c) data from over 17 million biomedical publications all confirms one striking trend: the number of authors per research paper is rising fast.
In Pakistan, research publications are a mandatory requirement for academic promotions. For instance, a faculty member generally needs 10 publications to be eligible for promotion from Assistant Professor (BPS-19) to Associate Professor (BPS-20), and 15 publications to advance from Associate Professor to Full Professor (BPS-21).
What makes this system particularly intriguing is that every listed author on a paper is allowed to claim full credit for it, regardless of the total number of authors. If a paper has 3 authors, all three can list it as one of their required publications. If there are 10 authors, each of them can individually count it toward their promotion. Even in papers with 20 or more co-authors, all contributors are equally credited for a single publication.
This practice raises a critical and debatable issue: how should academic institutions handle authorship inflation in the context of promotions? Should every author—regardless of position in the byline—receive equal credit? Or should we consider a more statistical or targeted approach?
As multi-authored papers become the norm, critical questions about fairness and accountability in academic recognition emerge. Can we assume all listed authors—whether first, second, or tenth—contributed equally? When faculty claim full credit for papers despite marginal involvement, does this undermine the integrity of promotion criteria? Such practices may inadvertently encourage honorary or guest authorship, inflate academic records, and blur ethical boundaries—especially when senior faculty pressure inclusion. Should lead and middle authorship be evaluated differently? Can a “one paper, one credit” model truly reflect individual merit in highly collaborative works? Without enforced checks, contribution remains unverifiable during reviews. This raises concerns about quantity being valued over meaningful scholarship.
On one hand, the increasing number of authors on scientific publications can be seen as a positive reflection of collaborative research, indicating greater teamwork, interdisciplinary efforts, and the growing complexity of modern science. Multi-authorship often signals that diverse expertise is being pooled together—something that should be welcomed and encouraged in today’s global research ecosystem. However, on the other hand, this trend also raises important concerns. When authorship expands excessively, it can blur the lines between genuine contribution, honorary authorship, and even ghost authorship, thereby challenging the integrity and transparency of scholarly work. Such inflation not only makes it harder to assess individual contributions but may also have implications for promotions, funding decisions, and public trust in science. Therefore, what is needed is a thoughtful balance—one that both supports collaborative, interdisciplinary authorship while also implementing clearer guidelines and accountability measures to ensure that authorship credit remains meaningful, fair, and ethically sound.
Although some universities in Pakistan have internal policies that assign greater weight to authorship position—such as giving higher credit to the first author as compared to the second or third, etc.—there is a need for a unified national framework to address this issue. Developing a consistent and transparent national policy could provide more equitable and rigorous criteria for evaluating academic contributions in multi-authored research.
To address the challenges of authorship inflation, several fractional credit systems have already been developed and widely discussed in academic literature. For instance, methods such as the article point system, harmonic credit allocation, and fractional variants of the h-index and g-index aim to distribute credit more equitably among co-authors based on their position or contribution. These models may help provide a statistically grounded approach to evaluating individual scholarly output in multi-authored publications and could serve as valuable tools for institutions seeking fairer promotion and evaluation criteria.
