Those who qualify for authorship
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work.
- The Principal investigator leads the process, but authorship is a shared ethical decision, not a personal authority decision. The authorship can be discussed, but the final call rests with the principal investigator.
- Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; name in research proposals as co supervisors also, without following criteria, do not warrant an authorship.
- Have approved the final version of the manuscript to be published.
- The authors need to agree to always be accountable for all aspects of the work during the whole project, in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
- Those who do not meet all four criteria highlighted as bold above, should be acknowledged only. These authorship criteria are intended to preserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take responsibility for the work.
- All individuals who meet the first criterion (strictly) should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.
- It is the collective responsibility of the authors, to determine that all people named as authors meet all four criteria.
- Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged.
- In authorship ethics, “substantial work” (or substantial contribution) means a contribution that is intellectually meaningful and essential enough that the work could not have been completed in the same way without it. The ICMJE defines substantial contribution as participation in at least one of these core scholarly activities:
- Conception or design of the study, or
- Acquisition of data, or
- Analysis of data and not just collect it or perform the test, or
- Interpretation of data
But this alone is not enough for authorship. To qualify as an author, the person must also:
- help draft or critically revise the manuscript,
- approve the final version,
- accept accountability for the work.
- Those who do not qualify for authorship are those who do acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading.
- Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g. “Clinical Investigators” or “Participating Investigators”), and their contributions should be specified (e.g., “served as scientific advisors,” “collected data,” “participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript”).
- Principal investigators or corresponding authors are advised to require that they obtain written permission to be acknowledged from all acknowledged individuals.
- Being a co-supervisor on a PhD/Masters or staff project does not automatically entitle someone to authorship merely because their name appears in the approved proposal or supervisory panel. The guidelines say that across biomedical and scientific journals, every listed author must satisfy all four conditions specifically highlighted as bold in this list above. Supervision alone is NOT enough. They should normally be acknowledged, not listed as an author.
- It is extremely important to make Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial Relationships and Activities, and Conflicts of Interest as an author’s relationships or activities with sponsor may represent conflicts.
- Use of AI for writing assistance should be reported in the acknowledgment section (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the production of submitted work.
- Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the submitted work in the appropriate section if applicable, how they used it. For example, if AI was used for writing assistance, describe this in the acknowledgment section. If AI was used for data collection, analysis, or figure generation, authors should describe this use in the methods.
- Humans are responsible for any submitted material that included the use of AI-assisted technologies.
ICMJE Recommendations: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/
