Abstract

Since researchers depend highly on their publication achievements for their career advancement, it becomes evident that the fair allocation of authorship is a critical factor to mitigate potential conflict among co-authors. The proposed authorship assessment rubric of documentation would encourage in-progress communication and maintain the ethical standards of authorship among contributors. This article developed an assessment rubric based on the authors’ activity and involvement in the research and publication processes to allocate authorship and to calculate their contribution percentage. This article classified authorship into several steps of accountability and their related activities as the fundamental elements for authorship allocation, documentation, and evaluation. This study simulated and demonstrated two possible outcomes of authorship allocation based on three authors’ input in multidisciplinary teamwork and publication circumstances. The proposed rubric recorded authors’ contributing activities and ratings of involvement, which provided the fundamental data for the authors, the publishers, and the administrators to perform authorship evaluation and set the authors’ byline position. This article advocates the fair allocation of authorship and contribution as the ideal approach to counter the long-term effect of multi-disciplinary research collaboration and its involvement in proper accreditation of authorship to the rightful authors with no bias to their seniority.