title: Scientific misconducts and authorship conflicts: Indian perspective.
abstract: This article is a narrative review about how appropriate authorship can be achieved, a brief mention about various scientific misconducts, the reason and consequences of such misconducts and finally, the policies to be adopted by the aspiring authors to avert these problems. The literature search was performed in the Google and PubMed using 'scientific misconduct', 'honorary/ghost authorship', 'publish-or-perish', 'plagiarism' and other related key words and phrases. More than 300 free full-text articles published from 1990 to 2015 were retrieved and studied. Many consensus views have been presented regarding what constitutes authorship, the authorship order and different scientific misconducts. The conflicts about authorship issues related to publication of dissertation, the area of the grey zone have been discussed. Suggestions from different authorities about improving the existing inappropriate authorship issues have been included.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anaesthesiology, North Bengal Medical College, Darjeeling, West Bengal, India.
authors.forename: Mohanchandra
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mandal
authors.affiliation: Howrah District Hospital, Howrah, West Bengal, India.
authors.forename: Dipanjan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bagchi
authors.affiliation: Department of Anaesthesiology, North Bengal Medical College, Darjeeling, West Bengal, India.
authors.forename: Sekhar Ranjan
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Basu
keywords: Authorship; biomedical research/ethics; plagiarism; scientific misconduct