5.1 Authorship Responsibility.

Some judge of authors' names, not works, and thenNor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.    Alexander PopeMore than 50 years ago, Richard M. Hewitt, MD, then head of the Section of Publications at the Mayo Clinic, described the ethics of authorship in a JAMA article entitled “Exposition as Applied to Medicine: A Glance at the Ethics of It.” The following excerpts from Hewitt’s article demonstrate an appreciation of the basic ethical responsibilities and obligations of authorship: Authorship cannot be conferred; it may be undertaken by one who will shoulder the responsibility that goes with it. The reader of a ...Less

Authorship offers significant professional and personal rewards, but these rewards are accompanied by substantial responsibility. During the 1980s, biomedical editors began requiring contributors to meet specific criteria for authorship. These criteria were first developed for medical journals under the initiative of Edward J. Huth, MD, then editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, who cited Hewitt's work during discussions at the 1984 meeting of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The ICMJE guidelines were first published in 1985 and are now part of the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (see also , Manuscript Preparation). These ...Less

Changes made in authorship (ie, order, addition, and deletion of authors) should be discussed and approved by all authors. Any such changes made after a manuscript has been submitted should be explained to the journal. The BMJ’s policy for alterations in authorship of papers under consideration is a useful guide for other journals: Any change in authors and/or contributors after initial submission must be approved by all authors. This applies to additions, deletions, change of order to the authors, or contributions being attributed differently. Any alterations must be explained to the editor. The editor may contact any of the authors ...Less

Group or collaborative authorship usually involves multicenter study investigators, members of working groups, and official or self-appointed expert boards, panels, or committees. Such group-author papers are also referred to as collaborative, corporate, and collective author papers. These groups can comprise hundreds of participants and often represent complex, multidisciplinary collaborations, and therefore, decisions about listing group authorship pose several problems and dilemmas for authors, editors, journals, librarians, and bibliographic databases (see , Abbreviations, Collaborative Groups, and , Manuscript Preparation, Bylines and End-of-Text Signatures, Multiple Authors, Group Authors).Large trials and studies are often best known and frequently referred to by their study ...Less

At least 1 author must be responsible for any part of an article crucial to its main conclusions, and everyone listed as an author must have made a substantial contribution to that specific article. As described in , Authorship: Definition, Criteria, Contributions, and Requirements, many journals require authors to sign statements of authorship responsibility and to indicate specific contributions of all authors. In addition to improving the transparency of author responsibility, accountability, and credit, these policies may help eliminate guest authors and identify ghost authors.Traditionally, supervisors, department chairs, and mentors have been given guest, or honorary, places in the byline ...Less

The number of authors whose names appear in the byline of scientific papers increased steadily during the second half of the 20th century. This increase occurred as a result of specialization, multidisciplinary collaboration, and the advent of large multicenter studies. However, authorship inflation has diluted the meaning of authorship. For example, which authors in a byline that contains more than 100 names can state that they actually wrote the paper or that they participated sufficiently to take public responsibility for the work? In response to this problem, suggestions were made in the 1980s and 1990s to limit the number of ...Less

Before proposals for identifying authors' contributions began to be implemented, proposed guides for determining order of authorship ranged from simple alphabetical listings to mathematical formulas for assessing specific levels of individual contribution levels. However, even the most systematic calculations of contribution levels will require some measure of subjective judgment, and determination of order of authors is best done by the authors' collective assessment of each other’s level of contribution. Moreover, as Rennie et al have argued, attempts to provide information to readers by ordering authors in particular ways is not meaningful, especially if each author’s contributions are not made public. ...Less

The practice of publishing unsigned or anonymous editorials provides “vituperative editorialists” protection from the enemies they might make when taking unpopular stands in the pages of their journals. However, without named authors and affiliations, readers lack information to judge the objectivity and credibility of the articles. Although this practice is the norm for newspaper editorial pages, it has fallen out of use in most peer-reviewed journals. One rationale for anonymity has been that editorials, signed or not, represent the official opinion of the publication or the owner of the publication. However, such anonymity distances the real author(s) from accountability. For ...Less