I'm not sure this is always bad, as long is it's obvious it's not serious or for the purpose of fraud, or if the individual cited actually contributed in some w

I'm not sure this is always bad, as long is it's obvious it's not serious or for the purpose of fraud, or if the individual cited actually contributed in some way. Here's a researcher's dog, whose name was Galadriel Mirkwood, cited as a co-author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Dog_co-author_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Dog_co-author_... Who is to say the dog did not contribute to the author's paper and research in some way she found significant? Likewise with the children. There's tons of papers where people are cited for making the most minor contribution, like just suggesting something that reminded the researcher of something else and that's considered a legitimate practice to acknowledge their inspirational or otherwise supportive input. And yeah kids can make useful suggestions into their parents research and should be allowed to be acknowledged when that is the case. The dog lady was banned from publication until the angry editor died! Overkill IMO as I see no fraud there. Fortunately when she was up for tenure she got it, with the tenure committee finding regarding the dog issue that the coauthorship was legitimate because "It was a real dog [a frequent lab visitor] and they said it had done no less research than some other coauthors had." In the Korean case the article notes that after an 2018 audit of 82 papers with child coauthors they were able to determine that about half the children named had participated in the research. So at least that half were legitimately credited. The article then notes that currently 549 papers with child authorship have been reviewed, and only 24 were found to have unjustified authorship. Only 24 of 549 papers with child authors! That's only 4% of papers with child authors being unjustified. What percentage of papers without child authors give unjustified credit? Is it more than 4%? Perhaps! And certainly so for the field of ghostcredited pharmaceutical papers, a known huge problem. It's possible that papers with child authors are even less likely to have unjustified authorship than papers in general.