“The worst cases involve free-riding supervisors making themselves the first author with the student second, down the list or excluded altogether. “This is badly needed to protect early career academics from authorship theft,” he said. Although the practice of a PhD supervisor adding their name to a student’s paper “might appear harmless”, it was still a “form of fraud”, he continued. This type of “authorship fraud” is “even encouraged within some institutions as evidence that research supervisors are doing a good job in helping their students to publish”, Macfarlane explained. “In East Asia it has become more common for young and inexperienced students to do a PhD by publication rather than a traditional PhD.

Source: The Times March 20, 2026 16:30 UTC