Deciding who to include as an author on your manuscript can be a sensitive issue. Authorship is one of the top consult topics received by the Publications Officer. It is also one of the major concerns raised at COPE forum discussions.
It is good practice to discuss authorship and author order upfront when you are at the initial stages of planning research so as to avoid potential future conflicts. At the end of the projects researchers should confirm authorship.
OHRI recommends the ICMJE guidelines for authorship. Accordingly, authorship should be based on the following 4 criteria:
1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Anyone who qualifies for authorship, based on the above, should be listed. Importantly, this includes research staff, consultants, trainees and students. Those who do not meet all four of the above criteria should be acknowledged (please see ‘Acknowledgements’ section 6). Please note: These criteria are not intended to be used as a means of disqualifying colleagues from authorship. Anyone who meets the first criterion should be given the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.
Researchers are encouraged to complete an author contribution section when publishing, where possible. The Credit Taxonomy (shown below) may be a helpful tool to use to distinguish research components. This allows readers to know who in the team was responsible for which aspects of the study. It can also help prevent issues like ghost authorship and guest authorship.
| # | Role | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Conceptulaization | Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. |
| 2 | Data curation | Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use. |
| 3 | Formal analysis | Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data. |
| 4 | Funding acquisition | Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. |
| 5 | Investigation | Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. |
| 6 | Methodology | Development or design of methodology; creation of models. |
| 7 | Project administration | Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. |
| 8 | Resources | Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. |
| 9 | Software | Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. |
| 10 | Supervision | Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. |
| 11 | Validation | Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. |
| 12 | Visualization | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation. |
| 13 | Writing- Original draft | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation). |
Guest authorship refers to a situation in which an author is included on a manuscript solely because it is perceived that the inclusion of their name will increase the perception of the work. In cases of guest authorship, the ‘guest’ does not meet the criteria for authorship because they did not make any/sufficient contribution to the manuscript.
Gift authorship, sometimes referred to as ‘honorary authorship’, refers to a situation in which an author is included on a manuscript as a result of an insignificant or indirect involvement in the project.
Ghost authorship refers to a situation where someone makes a substantial contribution to the project (e.g., does data analysis or writing), but they are not subsequently listed as a co-author or otherwise acknowledged in the manuscript.
When establishing the authorship order for a manuscript, OHRI recommends:
1. The authors should decide on authorship and authorship order together prior to drafting their manuscript.
2. Authors should specify in their manuscript a description of the contributions of each author so that readers can interpret their roles correctly.
