SIPS 2025 Budapest

A fair and transparent attribution of authorship remains a pressing issue in academia. While established guidelines like APA’s and frameworks such as the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) offer structured approaches, students’ contributions to science often go unrecognized. Our research shows that 86.2% of German psychology students and 38.9% of researchers are unaware of existing authorship guidelines, and conflicts over authorship are widespread. To address this, a task force at RUB university has developed a guideline to systematically acknowledge student contributions using CRediT. This initiative integrates authorship education into curricula and fosters a culture of transparency in collaboration between researchers and students. By implementing such criteria, we aim to promote fairness in publication practices and encourage student engagement in academia. Our talk presents insights from our survey, outlines the development process of the guideline, and discusses its implications for academic institutions striving for equitable recognition of research contributions.

Errors are an inevitable part of research, yet academia often lacks a constructive and systematic approach to error management. Fear of reputational damage when errors are uncovered discourages data sharing and the adoption of open science practices. The stigmatization of errors in science undermines the sharing of research data whose availability is central to the reproducibility of results.

This unconference explores how systemic, group, and individual factors shape researchers' error-handling and data-sharing behaviors. Discussions focus on the role of disciplinary norms, research and publication infrastructures, and their influence on perceptions of errors. Different taxonomies of errors are discussed in relation to our everyday research experiences, highlighting gaps and inconsistencies in current approaches.

These discussions are intended to lay the foundation for a future empirical study among researchers from different disciplines on the handling and perception of errors in the scientific process.