Workshop 3: Authorship, Author By-line & Names & Address
Introduction
In today’s workshop we consider the vexed question of authorship. Who should be included as an author on your paper? Or alternatively, what contribution is required for someone to qualify as an author? We also examine issues as the order of names on a paper, the format for citing your own name on a paper and address for correspondence. These issues may seem citing trivial, but an understanding of them can prevent problems and disputes from occurring in future.
Who should be an author?
The part of paper that comes immediately after the title is the author’s by-line, which is a list of people who made an important contribution to the published paper. Writing this by-line is usually straight-forward, but great judgment is needed in some cases when deciding on whether someone should be included a co-author, and also the order in which the names of co-authors are cited. Dispute over a co-authorship can arise, and as pointed out by Day (1998) “reasonable, rational, colleagues can become bitter enemies solely because they could not agree on whose names should be listed or in what order.” After all the only people who never get upset about authorship are the people who do not publish papers!
Comprehensive guidelines on authorship are published by the International
Committee of Medical Journal Editors ( This organization states that:
“Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.”
Failure to take responsibility for the content of a paper is important as the following editorial in Nature points out: “Few would dispute that researchers have to take responsibility for papers that have their names on them. A senior laboratory figure who puts his or her name on a paper without direct supervision or involvement is unquestionably abusing the system of credit. There have been occasions where distinguished scientists have put their names irresponsibly on a paper that has turned out to contain serious errors or fraud. Rightly some of them have paid a heavy price.”(Anon 1997)
Criteria for co-authorship
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors state that “one or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole from inception to published article.” Agreement on who this person is should be reached before embarking on a piece of research. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors defines an author using the following criteria (see : (1) Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or
analysis and interpretation of data.
(2) Drafting the article of revising it critically for important intellectual content. (3) Final approval of the version to be published.
All the three criteria must be met, according to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors before someone can qualify as an author. This organization does not consider the following contributions as giving someone the right to be an author:
(1) Acquisition of funding.
(2) Collection of data (technical help of a routine nature). (3) General supervision of research group or student. (4) Writing assistance of a routine nature.
Many people consider the aforementioned guidelines as too restrictive. In particular some feel that they undervalue the contributions of skilled technicians (see below). Furthermore, the guidelines do not specify what should be considered as a substantial intellectual contribution to the research (criteria 1). To overcome this problem and to make it easier to come to a judgment about who should be an author on a paper some professors have developed criteria for authorship that weight the different criteria and assign points to each criterion. The decision on whether to include a person as an author on a paper is then based upon whether they reached a minimum point score, for example 10% of the total points allocated to all criteria. For example, Kosslyn (2002) allocated 1000 points to the following 6 criteria:
(1) The idea (250 points)
(2) Experimental design (100 points)
(3) The implementation; translating experimental design into instructions and
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