A 2025 cross-sectional survey of psychology researchers puts numbers on a problem authorship-integrity guidance usually only describes in general terms: how often gift authorship and ghost authorship actually happen, and whether having explicit authorship guidelines changes the outcome. The study, conducted by a team at KU Leuven and published in the SAGE journal Research Ethics, surveyed more than 800 psychology (co-)authors and found gift authorship reported far more often than ghost authorship — and a measurable link between guideline use and how fair researchers perceive their own authorship decisions to be.
This guide summarizes what the survey found, how it was conducted, where its findings agree with the broader authorship-integrity literature, and what the results suggest for institutions and journals deciding whether to adopt or actively promote explicit authorship criteria such as the ICMJE authorship criteria referenced in COPE’s ghost/guest/gift authorship flowchart.
The study: who, how many, and how it was run
The paper, “Gift and ghost authorship and the use of authorship guidelines in psychology journals: A cross-sectional survey,” was written by Steven De Peuter, Jana Reck, Steffi Bellekens, and Gert Storms, all affiliated with KU Leuven in Belgium. It was published in Research Ethics (SAGE), volume 21, in 2025, after first appearing on the OSF Preprints server in December 2023.
- Respondents: 811 psychology (co-)authors completed the questionnaire, out of roughly 2,741 people invited — a response rate of about 29.6%.
- Recruitment: the authors drew their invitation list from corresponding authors on recent psychology journal articles, and the sample skewed toward respondents based in Europe and North America.
- Method: an anonymous online survey asking respondents to recall their own experience with gift authorship, ghost authorship, and the presence or absence of explicit authorship guidelines in their research settings.
The authors describe the sample as a convenience sample rather than a random, representative one, and are explicit that the results describe the experience of the researchers who responded rather than a definitive prevalence rate for psychology as a discipline. The manuscript itself had a difficult path to publication — according to reporting by Retraction Watch, it was desk-rejected three times before being posted as a preprint and eventually accepted.
Gift authorship: reported far more often than ghost authorship
The survey’s central finding is a sharp asymmetry between the two forms of authorship misattribution it measured. Respondents reported having experienced gift authorship — someone credited as an author despite not having made a substantial contribution — considerably more often than ghost authorship, where someone who did contribute substantially was left off the byline entirely.
Reporting on the study’s findings converges on the same broad pattern: close to half of respondents said they had been involved in a project where gift authorship occurred at least a few times, while ghost authorship was reported by a noticeably smaller share — roughly one in six to one in five respondents reporting repeated experience with it. That asymmetry is consistent with a widely observed pattern in the authorship-integrity literature more broadly: it is functionally easier, and often lower-friction socially, to add an under-contributing name to a byline than it is to omit a contributing one, since the latter usually surfaces as an active grievance while the former often does not surface as a complaint at all.
This differs from what surveys and audits in biomedical and clinical research have historically found, where ghost authorship — particularly ghostwriting tied to industry-sponsored manuscripts — has drawn more sustained scrutiny (see CASRAI’s guide on industry-sponsored research authorship). The De Peuter et al. survey’s authors note this discipline-level difference explicitly: psychology, as a largely academically-funded field with fewer commercial sponsorship pressures than biomedicine, appears to face a different mix of authorship risks — skewed toward gift authorship rather than ghostwriting.
Guideline awareness: about half of research settings actively encourage explicit criteria
The second half of the survey asked about authorship guidelines — not whether they exist in the abstract (most institutions can point to some policy), but whether their use is actively encouraged in the respondent’s own research setting. Roughly half of respondents said explicit authorship guidelines, such as the ICMJE criteria or discipline-specific equivalents, were actively encouraged where they worked; the other half reported no such active encouragement, even where a formal policy nominally existed.
That distinction mattered for the outcomes the survey measured. In settings where guideline use was actively encouraged, respondents reported two things more often:
- Earlier authorship discussions — teams were more likely to talk about who would be listed as an author, and in what order, earlier in the life of a project rather than after the manuscript was substantially drafted.
- Fairer perceived outcomes — respondents in guideline-encouraging settings were more likely to describe the eventual authorship decisions on their projects as fair.
This is a correlational finding from a cross-sectional survey, not a controlled trial, so it cannot establish that encouraging guidelines directly causes fairer outcomes or lower gift-authorship rates on its own — settings that actively promote authorship guidelines may also differ in other ways (more established research-integrity infrastructure, more senior oversight, larger labs) that independently affect both variables. What the survey does provide is one of the more direct pieces of empirical evidence, specific to psychology, that active promotion of a framework like the ICMJE four-criteria test is associated with the kind of early, explicit authorship conversation that authorship-integrity guidance has recommended for years without much discipline-specific data to back it.
How this fits the wider authorship-integrity framework
The survey’s findings map cleanly onto the two established mechanisms CASRAI covers elsewhere for keeping bylines accurate:
- The COPE flowchart for suspected ghost, guest, or gift authorship gives editors and institutions a structured process for handling a specific suspected case; the survey shows how often that structured process might realistically be needed within a single field.
- The ICMJE’s four-part authorship test (substantial contribution; drafting or critical revision; final approval; and accountability — all four required, not any one alone) is the criteria set the survey’s “explicit authorship guidelines” question is effectively asking about. See the distinction covered in CASRAI’s comparison of ghost authorship vs. gift authorship for how the two failure modes diverge from that same four-part test in opposite directions.
The CRediT contributor-roles taxonomy (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022) is a related but separate mechanism: it records what each named contributor did, rather than deciding who qualifies as an author in the first place. A CRediT statement does not by itself prevent gift authorship, but pairing a mandatory contribution statement with an explicit authorship-criteria check is one of the more concrete, low-cost interventions a journal or department can adopt, and is consistent with what the survey found correlates with fairer perceived outcomes: making the basis for each name on the byline explicit and discussed early, rather than assumed.
Limitations to keep in mind
- Convenience sample: respondents were recruited via published-article correspondence and self-selected into completing the survey; researchers with strong feelings about authorship fairness (in either direction) may have been more likely to respond.
- Self-report and recall: both gift- and ghost-authorship experience were self-reported retrospectively, not verified against manuscript records or contribution statements.
- Regional skew: the respondent pool leaned toward Europe and North America, so the findings should not be generalized to psychology research globally without caution.
- Correlational, not causal: the guideline-encouragement finding is an association observed in survey data, not evidence from a controlled intervention.
None of these limitations undermine the core, well-corroborated pattern — gift authorship reported considerably more often than ghost authorship, and guideline encouragement associated with fairer perceived outcomes — but they matter for how strongly the results should be applied outside the surveyed population.
Frequently asked questions
How many psychology researchers were surveyed?
811 psychology (co-)authors completed the survey, out of roughly 2,741 invited, for a response rate of about 29.6%. The researchers who ran the study, based at KU Leuven, describe it as a convenience sample rather than a random, representative one.
Is gift authorship or ghost authorship more common in psychology, according to the survey?
Gift authorship was reported considerably more often. Close to half of respondents said they had experienced gift authorship — an author added despite not meeting substantial-contribution criteria — at least a few times, compared with a noticeably smaller share reporting repeated experience with ghost authorship, where a genuine contributor was left off the byline.
Do authorship guidelines actually reduce gift and ghost authorship?
The survey found that active encouragement of explicit authorship guidelines was associated with earlier authorship discussions and with respondents perceiving authorship decisions as fairer. Because this is a cross-sectional survey rather than a controlled trial, it shows a correlation, not proof that promoting guidelines directly causes lower misattribution rates.
What is the difference between gift authorship and ghost authorship?
Gift authorship is crediting someone as an author despite their not meeting substantial-contribution criteria (sometimes called guest or honorary authorship); ghost authorship is the reverse — someone who did contribute substantially is left off the author list entirely. See CASRAI’s comparison of the two for a full side-by-side.
How does psychology compare with biomedical fields on authorship misattribution?
Reporting on the survey notes that psychology, with less commercial sponsorship pressure than biomedicine, appears to face a different balance of risk — tilted toward gift authorship rather than the ghostwriting concerns that have drawn more scrutiny in industry-sponsored biomedical publications. This is a discipline-level pattern noted by the study’s authors, not a precise cross-field comparison from a single dataset.
