There seems to be at least two options. One is to follow the patent authorship model and have an attorney, or another disinterested party, inquire into the research work and, according to existing legal standards for patent authorship, write down the list of authors. The latter procedure may also respond to concerns about minor contributions resulting in authorship credit since the extent of all contributions would be stated. However, it is likely that the scientific community will not adopt any new procedures. Therefore authorship assignment needs to be studied further given its fundamental importance for the scientific endeavor.
Several topics are worthy of further research.
For example, while this paper has made some progress in elucidating the current procedure for assigning authorship, more details are needed. A second topic of interest is the perceptions of supervisors. Vasta's observation that the tendency of awarding honorary authorship is not related to professional age, and the finding of Swazey, Anderson and Lewis 5 that both faculty and graduate students report a similar rate of faculty authorship misappropriation both suggest that supervisors would not tell a different story. However, a longitudinal study of authorship assignment across the graduate student-faculty transition would shed further light on this question. In addition, the relationship between authorship credit and intellectual property needs to be clarified among all members of the scientific community.