I just came across this student essay in which a blog post written by Les Back was attributed to me. This isn’t the first time it’s happened and I’m unsure how to respond to it. The backlist of posts on Sociological Imagination is sprawling by this point, numbering in the low thousands. Most of these were written by me, though they vary between simple sharing of material elsewhere and substantive writing.
Regular guest-writers all have their own accounts so their authorship has been clearly marked. Our settled practice for irregular guest writer has been to have “by x x” in bold at the top of the piece, followed by a biography in bold at the bottom.
Unfortunately, it still indicates the name of the person who published the guest post on the blog, in this case Sadia Habib. Does this attribute authorship clearly enough? I’m starting to wonder if we need a different system. But I’m reluctant to create a new account for each guest author, both because it would add to the time demands of a website I already don’t have enough time for and I really don’t want to have to go back and manually add these for every previous guest post. Any alternative ideas would be much appreciated.
Mark Carrigan 