Authorship in Academia: Who Deserves Credit?

There’s been a lot of talk about authorship in academia and publishing lately. I recently came across a LinkedIn post where a PhD student raised concerns about authors being added without writing or analyzing data. I don’t know the details of that case, but it took me back to my own PhD journey.

Authorship can get tricky, especially when there’s no clear agreement upfront. I remember discussing this early on at SEED Lab at Purdue when Kerrie Douglas introduced us to the APA authorship determination scorecard (PDF). One thing that stuck with me was how much weight the scorecard gives to conceptualizing the research idea: it’s often invisible but absolutely fundamental.