Questionable authorship practices in scientific publishing are detrimental to research quality
and management. The existing literature dealing with the prevalence, and perceptions, of
such practices has focused on the medical sciences, and on experienced researchers. In
contrast, this study investigated how younger researchers (PhD students) from across the
faculties view fair authorship attribution, their experience with granting guest authorships to
more powerful researchers and their reasons for doing so. Data for the study were collected
in a survey of European PhD students. The final dataset included 1,336 participants from
five European countries (Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Switzerland) representing
all major disciplines. Approximately three in ten reported that they had granted at least
one guest authorship to “a person in power”. Half of these indicated that they had done so
because they had been told to do so by the person in power. Participants from the medical,
natural and technical sciences were much more likely to state that they had granted a guest
authorship than those from other faculties. We identified four general views about what is
sufficient for co-authorship. There were two dominant views. The first (inclusive view) considered
a broad range of contributions to merit co-authorship. The second (strongly writingoriented)
emphasised that co-authors must have written a piece of the manuscript text. The
inclusive view dominated in the natural, technical, and medical sciences. Participants from
other faculties were more evenly distributed between the inclusive and writing oriented view.
Those with an inclusive view were most likely to indicate that they have granted a guest
authorship. According to the experiences of our participants, questionable authorship practices
are prevalent among early-career researchers, and they appear to be reinforced
through a combination of coercive power relations and dominant norms in some research
cultures, particularly in the natural, technical, and medical sciences.