Authorship Issues Further Plagued by Traded and Commercialized Authorship Slots,and Faux Authorship Resulting from the Use of Generative AI

Dear The International Journal of Lower Extremity Wounds Editors,

Lazarides and Papanas are commended for their editorial that seeks to educate their journal's readership about some of the contentious – but well-known – authorship-related issues undermining science's integrity. ¹ The choice of words in their editorial's title is particularly interesting, because an endemic plague suggests an irreversibly damaging event that is not controlled by humans, but that at best, is controlled by nature.

I do not consider scholarly publishing as an organically natural phenomenon. If anything, all of its artificial constructs are human-made, including metrics-based rewards schemes. ² These distort the value of individuals’ contributions to the scientific enterprise and thus – by association – authorship, placing some would-be authors in morally compromised positions, even as they are surrounded by so many artificially created regulations and guidelines, as well as classifications, as suggested in Table 1 of the Lazarides and Papanas editorial. However, as they allude to briefly, a research team member might only contribute a small percentage of the group's workload, although the relative importance of their contribution might be larger than that of other team members, especially if their expertise is of a quintessential aspect of the research project. Therefore, there is a natural human element that allows authorship abuses to be controlled, provided that the team leader is honest, offering fair recognition where it is due, suggesting that the authorship disputes Lazarides and Papanas allude to are not quite an endemic plague, but strategically calculated attacks.

Who or what exactly is attacked? At least four entities are negatively impacted by unfair, invalid, or unwarranted authorship: authors who have worked hard to gain fair authorship; peers; editors who might feel attacked because integrity of their journals’ ethics policies has been violated; the defrauded scientific establishment. Those threats are partly born by the inability of editors to detect, measure or verify authorship, making any and all fancifully-sounding and hyper-granular guidelines, like those by the ICMJE, CRediT and QUAD, practically useless. ³ These leave scientific publishing permanently vulnerable to abuse, creating the impression of an endemic plague.

The authorship disputes eloquently described by Lazarides and Papanas might be miniscule relative to new and emerging threats, of which there are two. First, traded and purchased authorships, in which authorship positions and datasets are sold at a price, and managed by a handler, usually a paper mill. ⁴ Second, faux authorship, in which human authors, whether they have the intellectual capacity or not, rely on generative artificial intelligence and large language models like ChatGPT or DeepSeek to either draft their ideas, translate their thoughts, or heavily edit poorly written texts that might otherwise not be publishable, essentially creating a diversity-compliant generation of pseudo-intellectuals. ⁵

Continuing with the endemic plague analogy, the entire population may eventually be exterminated due to their inability to control the invading pest, or radical measures must be taken to save lives and the scientific fabric, which is at risk, but a practical and sustainable solution is currently difficult to envision.