Authorship Ethics in the Age of AI:
A Bibliometric Analysis
Keywords:
authorship ethics , artificial intelligence, bibliometric analysis, research integrity, copyright, intellectual propertyAbstract
Who should be credited when an AI system contributes to a manuscript or creative work depends partly on the setting. Academic publishing focuses on who verified the evidence and accepted responsibility for the text. Meanwhile, copyright scholarship concerns originality and legally recognised human contribution. We examine how these questions appear in Scopus-indexed research rather than assuming that authorship has one meaning across disciplines. The dataset contains 263 publications from 2005-2025, including articles, reviews, conference papers, books and book chapters. No language filter was applied. We analysed publication and citation metadata and used VOSviewer to examine keyword co-occurrence, average publication years and author co-citation. Research output was concentrated in 2023-2025 (218 records, 82.9%), with 119 publications solely in 2025. India contributed 38 affiliation-linked records, followed by the United States with 36. In the original Scopus subject-area chart, Social Sciences accounted for 40.2% of the displayed distribution, Computer Science for 20.8% and Arts and Humanities for 11.3%. The most common unmerged author keywords were ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘authorship’ and ‘copyright’. Keyword networks place publishing integrity alongside copyright and creative ownership, while co-citation connections are dominated by legal and philosophical scholarships. These patterns document the expansion of research across related but distinct problems. Nevertheless, they cannot establish whether specific legal arguments are sound or AI policies effective.
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