Faculty-student authorship practices in nursing: Cross-sectional study

Abstract

Background: Academic institutions often encourage nursing students to submit scholarly work for publication. Oftentimes, faculty and students collaborate on scholarship during a student's enrollment in a nursing program. Although there are benefits to the faculty and students, there are also areas of conflict due to the lack of professional and institutional guidelines to ensure equitable gains.

Purpose: The study explored authorship practices among nursing institutions in order to identify criteria for faculty-student authorship guidelines and policies.

Methods: A descriptive and cross-sectional study was utilized to describe nursing faculty's perception of best practices for faculty-student authorship and their level of comfort with specific components of the authorship process.

Results: There were several criteria that the faculty identified as warranting authorship credit, such as completing the review of the literature or making substantial contributions to analysis and interpretation of data. On the other hand, there were several criteria the faculty felt neutral or did not warrant authorship credit, such as providing general administration support or writing assistance.

Conclusion: Most faculty felt comfortable discussing authorship criteria with students. However, their responses highlighted complexities inherent in faculty-student relationships when collaborating on scholarship. This accentuated the need for the nursing profession and institutions to develop and implement faculty-student authorship guidelines.

Keywords: Authorship; Authorship policy; Authorship resolution; Faculty-student authorship; Faculty-student collaborations; Publication ethics.