Tillskrivningar

Tillskrivningar refers to the act or result of attributing a work, a passage, an idea, or a statement to a person or source. In Swedish scholarly discourse it is used most often in literary studies, philology, and historiography, where authorship, responsibility, or provenance must be established or questioned. The term covers both formal attributions in bibliographies and more informal or disputed claims about who created a text or idea.

In practice, tillskrivningar can arise in several forms: explicit attributions in title pages or prefaces; editor’s notes or critical apparatus that state that a work is tillskriven to a particular author; marginalia or scribal attributions in manuscript culture; and modern metadata that credit authors in databases. They may also concern methodological attributions, such as attributing a theory to a scientist or a nation.

Challenges include anonymous or pseudonymous works, false attributions, or disputed authorship. Textual criticism, biography, provenance research, and stylometry are among the methods used to evaluate and sometimes revise tillskrivningar. The concept is distinct from plagiarism, which concerns the use of another’s work without proper acknowledgement; tillskrivningar focus on who is credited, which may be accurate or contested.

In practice, tillskrivningar affect interpretation, reception, and scholarly credit. See also authorship attribution, textual criticism, and bibliographic metadata.