One of the most commonly-used criteria for determining authorship is the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations. They suggest that authorship be based on these 4 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 reviewing 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
Shamoo & Resnik (2022), authors of Responsible Conduct of Research, argue that these guidelines are hard to apply to publications without data collection. They recommend that authorship in these cases should be "based on a significant intellectual contribution to the activities involved in research, such as literature review, argument analysis, writing, mathematical modeling, etc." (Shamoo & Resnik, 2022, p. 111).
Individual journals and publishers have their own guidelines for determining authorship on a publication. Be sure to consult these early on in the publication process.
Other Best Practices for Authorship:
- Discuss authorship at the beginning of a project and revisit the discussion as necessary.
- Write an author contribution statement for your publication to clearly state what roles and responsibilities each author had. Many publishers require these for scientific articles based on the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).
- Generative AI Tools & Authorship: AI tools like ChatGPT cannot meet the requirements for authorship such as taking responsibility for the publication or establishing if a conflict of interest exists. Most publishers follow COPE's position that AI tools cannot be listed as authors on a publication and that use of AI tools during the research and writing processes should be disclosed. Be sure to consult the AI policies for the specific journal or publisher.
- Link your ORCID Account: Persistent identifiers for researchers such as ORCID help to clearly identify authors of scholarly publications, particularly when there are multiple authors with the same name. Linking researchers and their publications helps to strengthen trust in scientific research.
