In the context of escalating authorship inflation and growing concern about research integrity, this article examines sole authorship as an epistemically and ethically grounded methodological condition within specific forms of contemplative and conceptual scholarship. Focusing on forms of inquiry in which interpretation constitutes the primary analytic process, I argue that sole authorship supports a continuous and traceable interpretive arc, central to epistemic integrity. In such contexts, continuity of interpretation not only enables conceptual coherence but also underpins ethical accountability by ensuring that responsibility for interpretive decisions remains clearly identifiable across the analytic process. Framed as a contemplative method grounded in mindful solitude, understood as an intentional orientation toward inward integration, sole authorship is situated within contemplative psychology and extended to methodologies such as Intuitive Inquiry, heuristic inquiry, hermeneutic phenomenology, and autoethnography, where interpretive validity depends on a sustained authorial perspective. While collaborative research remains essential across many domains, this article identifies conditions under which a unified authorial voice provides methodological advantages not fully reproduced through distributed authorship. The argument is therefore not that sole authorship offers a general solution, but that it functions as a context-specific stance aligned with the epistemic and ethical demands of contemplative scholarship.

Holcombe et al. (2026) propose practical mechanisms for making specific non-author research contributions more visible through ORCID identifiers, CRediT information, manuscript submission systems, and JATS-XML metadata. We support this aim but argue that its implementation requires a clearer distinction between two questions: how substantive contributions should be formally credited, and how broadly authors may acknowledge the human relationships and circumstances underlying scholarly work. We propose two complementary categories: a structured Contributor Listing for machine-readable author and non-author contributions and narrative Acknowledgments for gratitude and contextual recognition. This distinction would advance visibility and accountability without allowing the standardization of contributor credit to become the standardization of gratitude.

Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) is increasingly becoming a site for international research to examine global climate change, biodiversity, deposits of rare earth elements, and various existing health disparities. Yet, there is no comprehensive code of ethical guidelines for responsible and culturally centered research there. International researchers conducting research in Kalaallit Nunaat are bound by research ethics regulations governed their home countries and institutions, but these are varied and, perhaps most importantly, were established independently of Kalaallit (Greenlanders). Consequently, in many cases, research in Kalaallit Nunaat has failed to benefit or prioritize populations there and, in some cases, has caused unintended harms. Here we provide an overview of some of the problems that have resulted from research in Kalaallit Nunaat. These problems were identified from 27 listening sessions held across Kalaallit Nunaat with community members, municipality leaders, and researchers over a five-year period (2020-2025). The themes that arose reveal certain key limitations with applying Western research ethics policies to the Kalaallit Nunaat context. Specifically, such policies tend to neglect research equity, reflect an individualistic rights-based framework of ethics that is limiting, and presuppose that only humans deserve moral consideration.

Should the methodological tools and review protocols required of biomedical researchers become the default for social science meta-researchers? And should these reporoducibility standards then be used to gatekeep and police "methodological expertise?" This seems to be the judgmental sub-text of the Bakker et al commentary on our paper. In this response, we make the case for critical accountability research to cultivate forms of methodological rigor that are aligned with the research questions and design. Our paper, based on a systematic topographical review of research into retraction, sought to show the limits of the existing research base. Our survey highlighted how most existing work was quantitative, rarely interview-based, and often failed to explore why journals and publishers were so slow to retract. There is too little attention to the politics, economics, and sociology of research integrity.

It is an unfortunate reality that metascience and metaresearch are not immune to methodological or reporting issues. Best practices for conducting and reporting evidence syntheses are well-established, and we expect them to be enforced by this journal. Thus, we were surprised to see a recent "systematic review" published in Accountability in Research state that the first article published about retractions was from 1998. As we know of several potentially relevant articles published prior to 1998, we looked deeper into the review and its methodology. Because of the methodological and reporting flaws throughout the review, which we describe in this commentary, the conclusions it presents overstate the certainty and completeness of the findings, and the review includes inaccuracies. That these issues were seemingly not addressed prior to publication highlights the importance of involving individuals with methodological expertise, including search expertise, in the review process, and the necessity of adhering to the appropriate reporting guidelines to ensure accuracy, credibility, and reproducibility. We call on Accountability in Research to ensure that evidence syntheses are peer reviewed by individuals with appropriate methodological expertise; to ensure that authors are adhering to appropriate reporting guidelines; and to consider requiring study preregistration and presubmission inquiries for evidence syntheses.

Formal recognition of research contributions is critical for career advancement and the allocation of research funding. However, some contributions are mentioned only in the acknowledgments section, which are not indexed by scholarly databases, resulting in little recognition for those involved. We contextualize this shortfall in terms of contributorship, the movement to recognize specific research contributions rather than rely solely on authorship. Broadening the range of recognized individuals is currently advanced largely through reducing authorship restrictions and unbundling manuscripts into smaller elements, such as datasets and protocols, that receive their own attributions. Here we focus on a complementary path, enhancing the contents and metadata of acknowledgments sections. Capitalizing on existing infrastructure and standards, we propose: 1) when acknowledging individuals, authors include ORCIDs (subject to the acknowledgees' approval) and provide CRediT information where applicable; 2) publishers solicit identities of acknowledgees in a similar way to how they do so for authors in their submission portals; and 3) publishers include metadata of acknowledgees in JATS-XML files. Implementing these steps should encourage scholarly databases to index non-author contributors. The ensuing increase in visibility for research contributors, such as technicians and library professionals, should result in greater recognition of non-author roles.

Contemporary medical knowledge is generated within two interconnected economies that are often examined separately. First, the publishing market has become increasingly oligopolistic, transforming unpaid academic labour and public funding into substantial profits through subscription models and article processing charges. Second, a parallel clinical research economy has emerged around industry-sponsored trials, where per-patient payments and investigator fees can create a shadow profession that provides both income and prestige to physicians. This article argues that these systems do not merely coexist but mutually reinforce and obscure one another. The normalization of industry-mediated clinical advantages weakens awareness of publisher-mediated extraction, while the opacity of publishing finances renders the incentive structures of clinical trials ethically unremarkable. Using the metaphor of "mud" to describe the gradual internalization of structural distortions, the article examines how silence emerges at the intersection of prestige dependence, organizational conflicts of interest, and the entrepreneurial transformation of academic identity. Finally, it proposes practical individual-, institutional-, and policy-level measures, including greater transparency regarding trial-related income and support for community-governed publishing models, to strengthen ethical visibility and accountability in medical research.