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EN

Navigating the ethical landscape of scholarly publishing: a comparative evaluation of Gemini and DeepSeek LLMs in addressing authorship and contributorship disputes

Authors : Kannan Sridharan, Sivarama Krishnan

Background:

The rising complexity of publication ethics, particularly authorship disputes, necessitates exploring Large Language Models (LLMs) as potential evaluative tools. This study compares the performance of Google Gemini 2.5 Flash and DeepSeek-V3.2 against expert Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) forum responses.

Methods:

A cross-sectional analysis including 12 COPE authorship and contributorship cases was conducted using three prompting strategies: Minimal, Deterministic, and Stochastic. Responses were scored across seven domains on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = poor, 5 = excellent) by independent raters.

Results:

Both LLMs achieved perfect scores (5 ± 0) in Actionability of Recommendations and high marks in Safety and Avoidance of Hallucination (4.88 ± 0.33). In the Consistency with COPE Principles domain, DeepSeek performed slightly better than Gemini (4.45 ± 1.0 vs. 4.12 ± 1.29), while Gemini showed a better Overall Appropriateness (4.03 ± 0.98 vs. 3.82 ± 1.29) but they were not statistically significant. Both models struggled most with Identification of Ethical Issues (Gemini: 3.91 ± 1.33; DeepSeek: 3.82 ± 1.29). Under Minimal prompts, Gemini’s ethical identification was lower (3.55 ± 1.44) compared to Deterministic/Stochastic prompts (4.09 ± 1.3). Qualitatively, Gemini recorded an 8% major disagreement rate with COPE, while DeepSeek had a 16% combined (minor and major) disagreement rate. Mean similarity scores to COPE forum experts were approximately 4 for both models. Both models missed specific legal/copyright nuances but provided unique “value-add” strategies, such as author disassociation statements and editorial de-escalation training, not present in original COPE forum advice.

Conclusion:

LLMs demonstrated high degree of alignment with COPE expert ethical reasoning. While they possess a “legal blind spot,” their ability to provide actionable and clear guidance, optimized through structured prompting, makes them valuable supplementary tools for journal editors.

URL : Navigating the ethical landscape of scholarly publishing: a comparative evaluation of Gemini and DeepSeek LLMs in addressing authorship and contributorship disputes

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2026.1781697

Catégories
EN

Investigating the division of scientific labor using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

Authors : Vincent Larivière, David Pontille, Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Contributorship statements were introduced by scholarly journals in the late 1990s to provide more details on the specific contributions made by authors to research papers.

After more than a decade of idiosyncratic taxonomies by journals, a partnership between medical journals and standards organizations has led to the establishment, in 2015, of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), which provides a standardized set of 14 research contributions.

Using the data from Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals over the 2017–2018 period (N = 30,054 papers), this paper analyzes how research contributions are divided across research teams, focusing on the association between division of labor and number of authors, and authors’ position and specific contributions.

It also assesses whether some contributions are more likely to be performed in conjunction with others and examines how the new taxonomy provides greater insight into the gendered nature of labor division. The paper concludes with a discussion of results with respect to current issues in research evaluation, science policy, and responsible research practices.

URL : Investigating the division of scientific labor using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00097

Catégories
EN

Contributorship and division of labor in knowledge production

Scientific authorship has been increasingly complemented with contributorship statements. While such statements are said to ensure more equitable credit and responsibility attribution, they also provide an opportunity to examine the roles and functions that authors play in the construction of knowledge and the relationship between these roles and authorship order.

Drawing on a comprehensive and multidisciplinary dataset of 87,002 documents in which contributorship statements are found, this paper examines the forms that division of labor takes across disciplines, the relationships between various types of contributions, as well as the relationships between the contribution types and various indicators of authors’ seniority.

It shows that scientific work is more highly divided in medical disciplines than in mathematics, physics and disciplines of the social sciences, and that, with the exception of medicine, the writing of the paper is the task most often associated with authorship.

The results suggest a clear distinction between contributions that could be labelled as ‘technical’ and those that could be considered ‘conceptual’: While conceptual tasks are typically associated with authors with higher seniority, technical tasks are more often performed by younger scholars.

Finally, results provide evidence of a u-shaped relationship between extent of contribution and author order: In all disciplines, first and last authors typically contribute to more tasks than middle authors.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for the reward system of science.

URL : http://crctcs.openum.ca/files/sites/60/2016/04/Contributorship-Preprint.pdf