Authorship Criteria

Authorship gives recognition for an individual’s contributions to research work and giving them due credit. However, problems arise as research collaborations multiply and no consensus is reached when it comes to definitions. COPE’s authorship discussion document considers these issues to provide sensible solutions.

COPE suggests that journal publishers must have transparency regarding who contributed to the work and in what capacity as processes for managing potential disputes.

There are no universally accepted definitions for authorship, and customs and practices vary from one discipline and community to another. Completely different disciplines adopt their criteria, maybe, the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) pointers are well-known win the medical speciality fields, the APA (American Psychological Association) pointers are adopted in a scientific discipline, the EuChemS (European Chemical Society) regulations are adopted in Chemistry, whereas within the arts, humanities and social sciences, publications by single authors are common. Nonetheless, the minimum recognized necessities for authorship are creating a considerable contribution to the analysis and being in command of the work undertaken (COPE Discussion document: authorship). Many journals need authors to substantiate, on submission, that they and their co-authors meet the wants for authorship and typically give associate ORCID (Open investigator Contributor ID). associate ORCID provides a persistent digital symbol to tell apart people from others with similar names and links people to their analysis outputs.

Journals ought to notify all authors that they receive a submission and ensure that emails do not seem to be invalid. To enhance transparency, it is useful for journals to publish “author contribution statements” that explain however every author contributed. This approach has been recently extended by the CRediT “Contributor Roles Taxonomy”. It permits for an identical description of every author’s contribution to associate manuscript. This data is stored in author information and coupled to authors’ ORCID profiles for full transparency of authors’ contributions.

An individual who doesn’t fulfil authorship criteria for a specific piece of labour but has contributed to some capability ought to be acknowledged, with their approval. Minors who are concerned during a piece of research (for example, youngsters victimization technology) are generally acknowledged as they cannot be absolutely in command of all aspects of the analysis. Journals should encourage authors of intercultural analysis to contemplate acceptable attribution for content, to the extent that this attribution will not be compromised in agreement assurances of anonymity. This might embody “traditional knowledge” notices, or citation of autochthonic sources (such as people or community groups) or different cultural sources of data by name within the text. In some fields, corresponding to social science, acceptable attribution may need sharing authorship with intercultural collaborators, and this might differ from the approach counselled by the ICMJE. 

Deceased authors

If a manuscript is submitted with a deceased author listed, or associate author passes away while the manuscript is being peer-reviewed, then a footnote or similar ought to be added to the article pointing out the same. Journals mostly use a dagger image (†) in the footnote explaining the situation. An author ought to vouch for the contribution created by the deceased author and their potential conflicts of interest. If the deceased author was a corresponding author, then another author ought to be nominative. Note that copyright is considered private property beneath the law. If the author had not yet signed a copyright transfer agreement or license or granted an author the right to try and do this on his/her behalf in writing, permission would wish to be obtained from the author’s receiver.

Author changes name after publication

In cases when authors would like to alter their names after publication, journals ought to consider such requests, if cheap. If any changes are created, then these must be transparently recorded and duly recorded in the article. Other authors must be intimated regarding any changes created that will have an effect on them and be consulted on the phrasing of the correction. Editorial groups ought to use discretion and recognize that name changes could also be sensitive problems for authors and respect authors’ desires while maintaining a clear and reliable record of the research.

Authorship disputes

To resolve authorship disputes, editors ought to stick to COPE’s flowchart on “How to identify authorship issues.” Authorship disputes will typically have to be resolved by the cited establishments if the authors cannot resolve the dispute themselves.

Editors and journal workers as authors

Editors or board members must not get involved in editorial decisions regarding their work. A brief statement could also be helpful for any article that lists its editors or board members as authors which can be used to make the editorial call. While some journals will not contemplate original analysis papers from editors or workers of the journal, others have procedures in situ for creating certain honest referee in these instances.