Office of Research Compliance
USF Health · Office of Research

Determination and Responsibilities of Authorship

People often assume that since they share an interest in the same research area and have complementary skills and areas of expertise, things will just work out. But scientific collaborations, like other important relationships, take some forethought and some ongoing work to succeed.
 
--From Preempting Discord: Prenuptial Agreements For Scientists

 

Authorship Criteria and Determination

There are no universally accepted standards for authorship. Authorship practices may be guided by traditions or customs within a discipline or research group. In addition, most journals and publishers provide criteria for determining authorship.

Individual departments, research groups or laboratories should develop formal guidelines about decision-making relative to who should be an author and the order in which authors are listed and should advise new members of these authorship policies.

At the start of a collaborative research project, all collaborators should discuss and agree upon authorship criteria and order of authorship and commit these agreements to writing. Changes in circumstances (addition of new team members, withdrawal, change of contribution, etc.) should result in a timely revised agreement.

As a reference, the following are general guidelines for authorship promoted by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE):

 

ICJME Statement on Authorship

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article.

Authorship credit should be based only on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship.

Authors should provide a description of what each contributed, and editors should publish that information. All others who contributed to the work who are not authors should be named in the Acknowledgments, and what they did should be described.

http://www.icmje.org/

 

Proposed Procedures For Determining Authorship Credit/Resolving Disputes

Research teams should discuss decisions about authors and the order in which their names appear as early as possible under the guidance of the research team leader and commit such understandings to writing. Disputes over authorship are best settled at the local level by the authors themselves or the research team leader.

If a dispute cannot be resolved at the level of the research team, the dispute should be brought to the Department Chair. If a resolution still cannot be reached, or if any of the individuals are not satisfied with the proposed resolution, then the USF Health Faculty Affairs Office should be consulted. The Director of the USF Health Faculty Affairs Office will convene a committee of three faculty members within USF Health in a related field and one student, if a student is involved in the dispute, to serve as intercessor. The committee will consider the opinions of the parties at issue, and, if appropriate, the Department Chair, and will make recommendations to the research team leader. The recommendations of the committee are not binding without the consent of the research team leader.

 

University Resources

 

Other Resources

 

Other Institutional Authorship Guidelines