Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Two principal investigators at different institutions routinely add each other to every paper their respective labs publish, without either having contributed to the conception, analysis, drafting, or revision of the other's work.
- Is an instance
A research group informally agrees that a specific outside colleague will be added as co-author on unrelated papers in exchange for reciprocal author credit on their own submissions.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Two labs that jointly designed a study, collected and analyzed data together, and co-wrote the resulting manuscript credit each other as authors — this is ordinary collaborative authorship, not mutual support authorship, because each named author independently meets the ICMJE criteria.
Editorial commentary
Mutual support authorship (also called mutual admiration authorship) occurs when two or more researchers agree, explicitly or by informal understanding, to add each other as authors on each other’s papers regardless of whether each person actually meets the substantive criteria for authorship. The exchange is reciprocal: each party both grants and receives credit they have not individually earned, typically to inflate publication counts for tenure, promotion, or grant-review purposes.
How it differs from gift authorship
Gift authorship is usually one-directional — a non-contributing person (a department head, a grant holder, a senior colleague) is added to a paper as a courtesy or in exchange for resources, without necessarily adding anyone in return. Mutual support authorship is specifically the two-way, negotiated version of the same underlying problem: an authorship-for-authorship trade between peers, sometimes formalized as an ongoing arrangement across many papers rather than a single instance. Both practices violate the same core standard — the ICMJE authorship criteria, which require substantive contribution to the work, drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability for all listed authors.
Why it matters
Reciprocal authorship arrangements distort the scholarly record the same way gift and ghost authorship do: they misrepresent who is accountable for a paper’s content, dilute the signal that authorship is meant to send about actual contribution, and can be used to game the publication-count metrics used in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. COPE’s guidance on authorship and the ICMJE recommendations both treat authorship as something earned through defined contributions, not something to be traded. Journals that require structured contribution statements — for example using the CRediT taxonomy — make reciprocal, no-contribution authorship harder to conceal, since each listed author must be tied to a specific, checkable role. Disagreements that surface once a reciprocal arrangement is challenged are a common route into a broader authorship dispute.
References
- Babor, T.F., & Morisano, D. (2008), cited via ENAI Glossary of Academic Integrity: Mutual Support Authorship
- ICMJE Recommendations on authorship (current edition)
- COPE Discussion Document: Authorship (2019)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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