Group authorship (also known as corporate authorship, team authorship, consortium
authorship) refers to attribution practices that use the name of a collective (be
it team, group, project, corporation, or consortium) in the authorship byline. Data
shows that group authorships are on the rise but thus far, in scholarly discussions
about authorship, they have not gained much specific attention. Group authorship can
minimize tensions within the group about authorship order and the criteria used for
inclusion/exclusion of individual authors. However, current use of group authorships
has drawbacks, such as ethical challenges associated with the attribution of credit
and responsibilities, legal challenges regarding how copyrights are handled, and technical
challenges related to the lack of persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as ORCID, for
groups. We offer two recommendations: 1) Journals should develop and share context-specific
and unambiguous guidelines for group authorship, for which they can use the four baseline
requirements offered in this paper; 2) Using persistent identifiers for groups and
consistent reporting of members' contributions should be facilitated through devising
PIDs for groups and linking these to the ORCIDs of their individual contributors and
the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the published item.
