ABSTRACT
Concepts of authorship are rooted in a construct of the “author” that was developed via early modern literary, scholarly, legal, and publishing practices. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that there is no stable, unified concept of an author; instead, there are author functions, which vary across times, cultures, knowledge domains, and disciplines. Depending on contexts and needs, writers select rhetorical features to signal certain aspects of authorship.
This chapter traces the evolution of three author functions in scientific writing: assigning credit for, ownership of, and responsibility for scientific work. It ends with challenges to traditional authorship posed by the rise of massive multiauthorship and with recognition that established concepts of authorship disregard and disallow knowledge claims by indigenous peoples and other groups without the imprimatur or power of official scientific recognition.
