Author misrepresentation of institutional affiliations: protocol for an exploratory case study.

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Research Integrity
• Scholarly Communication

Background:

• Increasing research productivity is driven by university rankings and the "publish-or-perish" culture.
• Authors often list multiple institutional affiliations in publications.
• The veracity of these multiple affiliations, especially concerning substantial contributions, is often unverified.

Purpose of the Study:

• To empirically investigate the potential for author affiliation misrepresentation.
• To determine if reported institutional affiliations accurately reflect substantial contributions to research.
• To analyze authors with multiple affiliations, including at least one Chilean university.

Main Methods:

• Secondary data exploratory analysis of Scopus-indexed articles from 2016.
• Focus on authors reporting multiple institutional affiliations, with at least one being a Chilean university.
• Verification of affiliation through institutional websites; uncorroborated links are considered potential misrepresentation.

Main Results:

• Descriptive statistics will summarize findings on affiliation verification.
• The analysis will quantify instances where author affiliations could not be objectively linked to the institution.
• Results will highlight the extent of potential affiliation misrepresentation.

Conclusions:

• Findings will provide empirical evidence on the prevalence of author affiliation misrepresentation.
• The study contributes to understanding research integrity in the context of global academic collaboration.
• Results will inform policies and practices related to academic affiliations and publication ethics.