Authorship of scientific publications: contribution, order, and number

Did you ever have a disagreement over authorship? Or over the order of the authors? Here are some guidelines and pointers on how to prevent disputes.

 

Who deserves authorship?

Authorship of articles has important academic, social, and financial implications. This means that people should get credit where credit is due. However, this should also mean that people who do not deserve credit should not get a ‘free ride.’ We all know those people who did absolutely nothing to advance your research but who will demand authorship on a paper regardless. And since these are almost invariable people above you in rank, you may want to be ready for the situation.

You can start by checking various authorship guidelines. Large numbers of journals use the American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines or those of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), so you may want to check these out first.

 

Authorship guidelines

According to the APA guidelines, an author is anyone involved with initial research design, data collection and analysis, manuscript drafting, and final approval. However, the following do not necessarily qualify for authorship: providing funding or resources, mentorship, or contributing research but not helping with the publication itself.

According to the ICMJE guidelines, authorship should be based on the following four criteria:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND    

• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND

• Final approval of the version to be published; AND

• 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.

I found an Authorship Determination Scorecard that was developed for a psychology PhD program that may be helpful. A medical school adapted the scorecard, incorporating the ICMJE criteria, to create another Authorship Determination Scorecard more suitable for the medical field.

You can also check the authorship guidelines of the journal you aim to publish in. More and more journals ask you to specify each author’s contribution, and these contributions are published along with the article.

 

Determining the order of the authors

The order of authors is usually based on one of these criteria:

• Relative contribution. Where the first person contributed the most (data analysis and writing the manuscript), and the last position is usually reserved for the principal investigator.  There can be many exceptions, for instance, if the person who wrote the manuscript did not analyze the data. Everyone between the first and last author contributed less in descending order, with the middle position for the one who contributed the least. Multiple “first” or “last” authors can be assigned if necessary.

• Alphabetically. This is especially common for large collaborations with hundreds of authors.

• By negotiation. Since the relative contribution is often based on subjective criteria, many negotiation rounds may be necessary to decide the order.

I found a compelling alternative way to solve authorship order in a tweet by Simon Cork (@drsimoncork). He showed an article by M.P. Hassell and R.M. May, who determined authorship on a publication in the Journal of Animal Ecology by playing a 25 game of croquet at Imperial College Field Station during the summer of 1973. I don’t want to think about how long the croquet games would have taken to solve the order if there would have been more than two authors. Anyway, it may be an option if you like croquet.

I found another way to solve the order in an article by Tanigawa, Dyer, and Bejerano, where the authors’ order was based on age.

 

How many authors can there be on an article?

Anyone who deserves authorship according to the criteria above should be an author. This rule may result in hundreds of authors on publications that report data from large collaborations. The largest number of authors on a publication in PubMed is 5,399, and these large numbers are acceptable for many journals.  

Very few research articles have only one or two authors, and the average number of authors on articles in PubMed is five. I have come across some journals that limit the number of authors, which is rare, and limiting this to six for a research article and three for a short/case report, as done by one medical journal, seems a bit strange in light of the average author number.  

 

Advice about determining authorships

Decisions about authorship can be especially tricky in collaborations. It is best if the authors and their order are written down from the start of the collaboration to prevent disputes. But even in small groups, it can help to determine the names and order of authors before starting the research so everyone knows where they stand from the start.

For more blogs about research, writing, and publishing have a look here.