The False Currency of Authorship

Authorship, once conceived as a marker of intellectual contribution and responsibility, has become an inflated and ambiguous construct in contemporary science. This transformation exemplifies Goodhart’s Law, which posits that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Converted into institutional currency for evaluation and promotion, byline positions have created distorting incentives that erode meaning. This distortion is magnified by the Matthew Effect, whereby early prestige compounds into cumulative advantage, rendering first and last author positions disproportionately valuable. Countering these dynamics requires structural reform designed to dismantle the mechanics of this devaluation. This work argues for a transition away from symbolic hierarchies toward a system based on quantified, auditable contributorship. Such a framework would neutralize perverse incentives by replacing positional credit with numerical estimates of contribution, abolishing the entrenched first-last author hierarchy, and making declarations of work verifiable. Crucially, it demands a reorientation of institutional reward structures to prioritize quality and verified contributions over mere publication counts and byline placement. Replacing authorship with verifiable contributorship is not merely a technical adjustment but a necessary evolution to safeguard accountability, transparency, and fairness in research. This transition offers a feasible path to restore the integrity of academic recognition.