What worries me is the "regardless of whether the individual actually contributed". When you work in a research group it makes a lot of sense to include the name of your research fellows in the authors list. I think the real problem is the necessity to publish in what's been called "ranked" scientific journals, which dictate what you are to research and publish and what you are not to. Even the criteria used to evaluate these medias is questionable. The problem gets worse when you are not a native english speaker and publishes in another language since you don't get as many citations as you would get in english. Once we change the criteria and decentralize the publications out of these few ranked journals it won't be necessary to have your name put on something you didn't produce.

Absolutely. To not credit where it's due is in effect to "steal" that person's hard work. Do you think that's as common?

Joao, why do you feel it makes sense to include everyone from a research group? Also, why does the phrasing of that sentence worry you? I'm interested to hear this from your perspective.

I've been involved in research on social sciences for the last 5 years or so and it didn't seem right not to include the name of other researchers who did field work, discussed theory and analysed the data together with me. I didn't arrive at the results alone, so how could I publish something without including them? If you work as a group you should publish as a group. Of course by group I don't mean a bunch of people working isolated from each other. Social sciences should spend more time discussing even if the "object" of research isn't a co-author too. Now about the quote, you can't obviously put someone's name on something they didn't contribute to. I have heard that it is somehow pretty common to do so when you are an undergraduate student or a MSc because the policy of journals do not allow you to publish due to the lack of titles. These students "use" the name of their professor to publish, appearing just as co-authors when they actually did all the job. On the other side, I've heard also stories about students that did all the research and the writing and when it went for the publishing house some other names came out of nowhere as co-authors "representing" the industry that supported the research. After all, the high demand for publishing only diminishes the quality of what is being published. There are so many problems within academic life nowadays that the question we are debating looks like just the tip of the iceberg.

But if they did field work and analysed data they did contribute and should of course be on the paper. I'm taking about people who made absolutely no input or made a cup of tea for someone one day. If they were out on simply because they belonged to the group but didn't work on that particular paper that might be questionable.

Following the examples I wrote above, of course it is not acceptable even though it often happens. It gets even worse when you don't have the option to choose if you wanna add the person's name and are obliged to do so because of some "evil" hierachical power working on some research group (group leaders or sponsors). There is the ridiculous high demand for publishing, the limited ranked journals, sponsors pressure, small closed groups deciding what is published and what is not - sometimes not based on quality but on friendship -, people reproducing this mentality and of course, people trying to overcome the situation by means of cheating (the subject we are discussing here). I just see Academia in the way it is as an obstacle for exercising creativity and producing quality papers. It narrows the possibilities cause it wanna dictate what is acceptable or not, in another words, to create some order or pattern that may not be the best environment for those who seek to make and answer questions up to ethical standards. I often feel that I shouldn't present a paper that I think is not ready, but due to the demand I have to, and that is a really small issue compared to the cheating process of increasing the curriculum lines. We do have a problem, which depending on the context, stems from the market media (in some places you have private journals), or from the other proffessionals who using obscure criteria regulate who participates in events or who publishes (in Brazil, for example, the journals are vinculated to the universities). Then you have those people that in response they cheat and others that become bald, depressive, or develop some other way to face the issue.