Tokenism, nepotism and the hidden curriculum of authorship

Sarah Kiguli, and Roy Mubuuke Gonzaga, Makerere University

Kenan Dikilitas, Bergen University

The discussion also turned to a less visible but highly consequential aspect of doctoral education: authorship. Participants raised concerns about tokenistic and nepotistic practices in which individuals may be included in publications not because of their intellectual contribution, but because of their seniority, institutional position, personal relationships or perceived influence.

These practices are sometimes treated as an unfortunate feature of academic life which is what early career researchers simply need to learn to navigate. But this framing misses their educational significance.

For a PhD candidate, authorship is not merely about receiving credit for a publication. It is part of learning what it means to participate ethically in a scholarly community. When a student is expected to add a senior academic to a paper despite limited contribution or feels unable to question an authorship decision because of the power of a supervisor, the student is receiving a powerful lesson about how academic relationships work.

The lesson may be that status matters more than contribution.

Or that academic relationships and loyalty matter more than transparency.

Or that challenging someone more powerful carries risks.

Such experiences constitute part of the hidden curriculum of doctoral education. They shape not only what students do, but also what they come to believe about themselves and their place in academia.

Ian Munabi pointed to whistleblowing mechanisms as an important institutional response to such practices. Certainly, universities need mechanisms through which academic misconduct can be reported and addressed. But we should also ask whether a system that relies primarily on students reporting powerful academics is sufficient. A doctoral candidate may technically have the right to challenge an authorship decision while simultaneously feeling that exercising that right could damage their relationship with their supervisor, their publication opportunities, or even their academic future.

This is where the question of power becomes central.

In hierarchical academic environments, ethical authorship cannot simply be reduced to having rules about who qualifies as an author. We also need to create supervisory relationships in which students can safely discuss, question and negotiate authorship.

Supervisors therefore have an educational responsibility to make authorship practices transparent. Who contributed what? Why does someone qualify for authorship? What does each author’s contribution involve? When should authorship be discussed—at the end of a project, or at the beginning and revisited as the research develops?

These conversations can themselves become opportunities for doctoral learning.

Most importantly, we need to think beyond preventing malpractice. What kind of academic culture are we teaching students to reproduce?

If today’s doctoral candidates experience tokenistic authorship, they may reproduce it when they become supervisors. If they learn that seniority automatically entitles someone to authorship, that assumption can become normalised and passed to the next generation.

But the opposite is also possible.

If doctoral candidates experience authorship as a transparent, contribution-based and dialogic process, they learn that scholarship is a collective endeavour in which intellectual contributions—and not simply academic status—matter.

This is why the issue is bigger than authorship ethics.

We are not only deciding who gets their name on a paper. We are teaching future academics what academic integrity, collegiality and intellectual responsibility look like in practice.

And this brings us back to the fundamental question of doctoral supervision:

Who are we educating our PhD students to become?

If we want future academics who will transform rather than reproduce problematic academic cultures, then ethical practice cannot be something we teach in a policy document or a research ethics course alone. It has to be experienced in the everyday relationships through which doctoral students become academics.