Power, Not Ethics, Drives Most Authorship Conflicts in German Academia

Nearly one in four researchers at German universities has witnessed an authorship conflict at their professorship, and a sweeping new study suggests the problem is not primarily one of poor ethics training or fuzzy rules. Instead, the disputes are overwhelmingly structured by power: who holds the chair, who controls the contracts, and whose name becomes so routine on a paper that no one thinks to question it. The findings, drawn from a nationwide survey of more than 1,600 research staff across four disciplines, challenge the standard assumption that clearer authorship guidelines would be enough to fix a problem that has dogged academic publishing for decades.

The study, published open access in the journal Higher Education, surveyed 1,640 research staff at German professorships in business administration, biology, mechanical engineering, and sociology. Overall, 22.0 percent of respondents reported authorship conflicts at their professorship in recent years. Of the 373 respondents who reported conflicts, 302 provided narrative accounts detailed enough for systematic analysis, yielding 338 discrete conflict instances that were coded using template analysis. The analysis was anchored in a well-known sociological framework: Steven Lukes’s three views of power, which distinguish observable decision-making, the suppression of grievances from reaching decision arenas, and the shaping of perceptions so that grievances never form at all.

The central analytical move is a distinction between conflicts driven by power and conflicts driven by legitimate disagreement. Power-based mechanisms turned out to dominate the data. Hierarchical enforcement, in which supervisors push through authorship claims despite resistance because staff fear contract non-renewal, negative references, or delayed degrees, was reported by 49.6 percent of respondents with conflicts. Normalized power, in which hierarchical inclusion is treated as customary and automatic, accounted for 14.9 percent. Tribute systems, where authorship functions as currency exchanged for resources, evaluations, or continued collaboration, made up 10.1 percent. And systemic appropriation, the complete erasure of contributors, stood at 6.5 percent. Legitimate disagreement, by contrast, was reported by 37.5 percent.

Hierarchical enforcement manifested in strikingly consistent patterns across the narratives. Respondents described supervisors demanding first authorship despite minimal involvement, agreements on author order being reversed unilaterally after submission, and professors insisting on inclusion as a matter of command. One mechanical engineering respondent described formal directives from above requiring multiple supervisors with zero contribution to be named, leaving no solution and resistance structurally impossible. In sociology, where small chairs concentrate authority in a single supervisor, hierarchical enforcement was reported by 57.9 percent of conflicted respondents, the highest of any field, reflecting direct and largely unchecked control over authorship decisions.

Systemic appropriation represents the most severe mechanism identified: not unfair positioning but the complete removal of contributors from credit. One business administration respondent reported a commentary article and a textbook chapter written entirely by themselves that the professor submitted as exclusively his own without making any changes. Another described a request to write publications under the name of the institute leadership without being named, followed by apparent agreements to deny the arrangement. In sociology, appropriation extended beyond publications to presentations, with one respondent describing a chair holder who processed staff research without naming anyone and called it plagiarism outright. Because appropriation involves intentional erasure rather than disagreement about thresholds, the study classifies it as research misconduct requiring formal investigation rather than negotiation.

Tribute systems reveal how funding and infrastructure structures convert authorship into an exchange commodity. Biologists reported co-authorships being used to pay for access to expensive measuring devices, and engineers described scientists at large facilities such as synchrotron sources demanding co-authorship against the rules. Funding rules themselves generate strategic authorship: because grant applications may only be submitted by professors, publications must include the professor as author to enable follow-up funding, regardless of actual contribution. The study links this mechanism to recent work conceptualizing co-authorship as a traded commodity, extending that account by identifying the structural dependencies that make such exchanges coercive rather than voluntary.

Normalized power operates differently: not through active enforcement but through routinized expectation. Respondents in mechanical engineering, which showed the highest rates of both normalized power at 19.6 percent and honorary authorship at 45.7 percent, described the professor as always or by default first author, with the entire management named everywhere. The diagnostic marker is automaticity language: always, of course, standard. Crucially, the study finds evidence of constrained contestation rather than internalized acceptance. Respondents frequently recognized that these practices violated the German Research Foundation’s guidelines, which state that supervisory roles alone do not justify authorship, yet complied anyway and even defended the practice to external partners. Where authority is distributed across organizational hierarchies, entitlement can naturalize into anonymous institutional routine; where it is concentrated in one person, as in sociology, it remains visibly attached to an individual and is more contestable.

Not all conflicts were exercises of power, and the study is careful to separate them. Legitimate disagreement arises from genuine ambiguity about contribution thresholds: whether an idea raised in a project discussion justifies authorship, whether conceptual input outweighs empirical execution, or who takes first position when two contributors are truly equal. In one memorable case, two equal contributors resolved the question by drawing lots. Biology showed the highest share of legitimate disagreement at 48.8 percent, reflecting methodological diversity and complex divisions of labor between experimental design, data collection, and analysis, alongside a differentiated authorship system with first, last, and corresponding roles that creates multiple sites for contestation. Mechanical engineering, with clearer technical boundaries, showed the lowest legitimate disagreement rate at 28.4 percent, yet the highest combined hierarchical mechanisms, confirming that technical clarity does not prevent hierarchical imposition.

The disciplinary patterns carry the study’s most provocative implication: conflict mechanisms are shaped by epistemic cultures and organizational structure, not merely individual misconduct. Chair size, division of labor, documentation practices, and authorship conventions all mediate how power operates. Business administration’s individualistic publication traditions, where collaborative contributions are less systematically documented, showed the highest rate of complete contributor erasure. Mechanical engineering’s large organizational units increased hierarchical distance and strengthened normalized power. These findings suggest that the widely recommended remedies, clearer guidelines and ethics training, primarily address legitimate disagreement while leaving power-based dynamics untouched.

The author argues that meaningful reform requires mechanism-specific institutional interventions: collective decision-making structures, mandatory pre-project contribution agreements, independent reporting channels, decoupling resource access from authorship obligations, contribution tracking systems such as CRediT verified by all authors, and ombudsperson systems with genuine enforcement authority. Yet the data reveal a sobering precondition for any reform: institutional willingness to act. Respondents reported department heads declining to intervene in evident misconduct with reasons such as it would cause too much stress or this is how academia works. As long as career progression depends more on author position than on verified contribution, and as long as fixed-term contracts tie junior researchers’ futures to the very people whose names appear on their papers, authorship conflicts are likely to persist as a structural feature of academic life rather than an ethical anomaly that training can eliminate.

Subject of Research: Power-based mechanisms and disciplinary variation in authorship conflicts among German academic research staff

Article Title: Hierarchical power dynamics in authorship conflicts: Evidence from German academia

Article References: Lauer, S. (2026). Hierarchical power dynamics in authorship conflicts: Evidence from German academia. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01790-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01790-3

Keywords: authorship conflicts, academic power dynamics, German academia, research ethics, hierarchical enforcement, honorary authorship, legitimate disagreement, epistemic cultures, template analysis, higher education, research integrity, fixed-term contracts