Article

Unfair Authorship in Dissertation-Derived Publications from Ethical and Legal Perspectives

Abstract

The research examines the issue of unfair authorship, considered within the scope of scientific publication ethics and the law on intellectual property rights, by analysing the order of the authors of publications derived from the dissertations. To this tendency, tags of one hundred and sixty-one dissertations published in 2015-2019 by the Department of Business Administration-Management & Organization categorized by document analysis. The publications derived from those are determined using certain search criteria. In the last stage, descriptive statistics applied by SPSS to see the ethical reflection of the publications. Results show that unethical authorship is approximately 17%. The doctoral students are not the first author though they are the first carrier of the research. Out of 30 universities, 11 had unfair authorship practices and clustered mainly in 5. Discussing results with the gender of the authors and supervisors, titles, and universities show that the subject needs to consider both personal ethical values and the organizational culture. In this respect, the research will practically contribute to raising awareness about ethical violations, developing mechanisms for preventing unethical practices, and shed light on future studies which investigate the causes of unethical situations.

Keywords

Ethics publication ethics Law of İntellectual Property Rights author unfair authorship Dissertation document analysis