Research is a collaborative effort, and that collaboration extends to being honest and open about who gets an author credit.
Having your name on a published paper helps strengthen your academic record and improves your chances of securing funding for future projects. But when you are preparing a manuscript for submission, it’s important to be honest about the contributions of every possible author on the paper, to make sure that everyone involved gets the credit they deserve.
This post introduces some of the guidelines and criteria that authors and journals can refer to when deciding who earned a place on the author list. It also touches on some tricky situations, such as equal contributors or very long author lists.
Identifying author contribution
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has prepared criteria that each author on a paper should meet. Several journals refer to these criteria in their own policies, particularly in the biomedical sciences.