Dr. Hunton’s Research Misconduct, Co-authorship Incentives, and Journal Policies Regarding Co-authors’ Responsibility

Abstract

I summarize Dr. James Hunton’s research misconduct and then provide economics-based analysis related to some accounting community responses to his misconduct. One change made by some accounting journals was to introduce, highlight, or reinforce policies that spread responsibility for the research integrity of a paper among the paper’s co-authors. To explore this change, I create a model of publication incentives that demonstrates accounting researchers’ incentive to maximize the number of co-authors on each paper and minimize the amount they check each other’s work. From this model, I suggest that journal policy changes that focus on making co-authors responsible for data integrity alone may be too specific to Dr. Hunton’s exact method for research misconduct (i.e. data fabrication). Focusing on data integrity fails to address the incentive for researchers not to check each other’s work in all co-author roles, not just roles related to data integrity.