Guest Editorial Authorship dispute of a doctoral thesis publication

Publications in international academic journals are the most important measure of scientific productivity and academic achievement. However, pressure from the requirement to publish articles sometimes entices scientists to indulge in unethical behaviours.1 Therefore, ethical problems surrounding authorship, partic-ularly multiple-authorship, deserve further discussion. According to the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE),2 authorship credit should be based on substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data. Although this definition indicates what contributions qualify an indi-vidual to be an author, there is still no consensus on the sequence of author names in a by-line, particularly when it comes to publishing an article stemming from a doctoral dissertation or thesis. In Turkey, the faculty supervisor usually provides the idea for the dissertation and designs the study, while the student collects, analyses the data and writes the dissertation draft with the contribution of the supervisor. When the dissertation is to be published, usually the supervisor writes it as a research article, but his name is placed as co-author, whereas the student becomes the first author. Literature suggests that there is no consensus on authorship and the order of author names of a research article based on a doctoral dissertation. Morse3 draws attention to relationships of unequal power betwee