I, We, and They: A Linguistic and Narrative Exploration of the Authorship Process

Abstract Introduction While authorship plays a powerful role in the academy, research indicates many authors engage in questionable practices like honorary authorship. This suggests that authorship may be a contested space where individuals must exercise agency--a dynamic and emergent process, embedded in context--to negotiate potentially conflicting norms among published criteria, disciplines, and informal practices. This study explores how authors narrate their own and others’ agency in making authorship decisions. Method We conducted a mixed-methods analysis of 24 first authors’ accounts of authorship decisions on a recent multi-author paper. Authors included 14 females and 10 males in health professions education (HPE) from U.S. and Canadian institutions (10 assistant, 6 associate, and 8 full professors). Analysis took place in three phases: (1) linguistic analysis of grammatical structures shown to be associated with agency (coding for main clause subjects and verb types); (2) narrative analysis to create a “moral” and “title” for each account; and (3) integration of (1) and (2). Results Participants narrated other authors most frequently as main clause subjects (n = 191), then themselves (I; n = 151), inanimate nouns (it, the paper; n = 146), and author team (we; n = 105). Three broad types of agency were narrated: distributed (n = 15 participants), focusing on how resources and work were spread across team members; individual (n = 6), focusing on the first author’s action; and collaborative (n = 3), focusing on group actions. These three types of agency contained four sub-types, e.g., supported, contested, task-based, negotiated. Discussion This study highlights the complex and emergent nature of agency narrated by authors when making authorship decisions. Published criteria offer us starting point--the stated rules of the authorship game; this paper offers us a next step--the enacted and narrated approach to the game.