Authorship Bias

Authorship Effect

It is not uncommon for researchers to develop assessment tools (e.g., survey, theoretical construct) to test their research hypothesis. In doing so, authorship effect can occur. Authorship effect is when the designers of the assessment tool (i.e., the researchers) either fabricate their findings or search the data (i.e., data mining) to find more positive, significant results when examining their tool’s predictive validity and reliability. If their tool appears to other researchers to be a more reliable measure, then they are likely to use this tool in their research studies. When the researchers have a vested interest in their developed measure, they may find results that tend to show that their measure can be a gold standard for other researchers. Such bias can also extend to using an advisor’s or friend’s assessment tool or theory, whereby the results support the use of that instrument. In a similar vein, if these assessment tools are translated into a different language, authorship bias can also occur. If, for example, an assessment tool is developed in Spanish but an American researcher wants to translate it into English for use with the American population, the individual who performs the translation could have a conflict of interest that could manifest into a form of bias.

Citation Bias

In the case of citation bias, it is important to consider the two aspects to this idea: authorship/research credibility versus authorship/researcher egotism. Both of these aspects can emerge whenever researchers cite either their own research studies or the research of friends or advisors within their publications. Some researchers argue that authors may cite themselves in their publications because of the amount of information they have contributed to that body of research—establishing their credibility in that area of research. If authors do not cite their past work in the area in which the research study is focused, other researchers may think they are new to that specific area of research, [Page 70]potentially causing the authors to have less credibility on that particular topic. Others argue that using self-citations in research is a way to boost the ego of the authors. When authors cite their own research, they are doing so to increase the impact factor (a measure of the importance of an article based on number of citations) and citation frequency of their work, both of which can have a profound effect on the way in which the research is conducted and the findings reported.

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