Authorship is a critical component of any academic paper and is especially important in the sciences, where it can affect career advancement, grant funding, and professional reputation.
This piece is a useful discussion about dealing constructively with authorship disputes. Such disputes happen far too often and can be toxic, but can be handled fairly by having some institutional arrangements in place.
What does authorship mean at Cell Press?
Although policies on authorship can vary from editor to editor and across journals, Cell Press encourages the use of the CRediT taxonomy of contributor roles to help define who should be an author. CRediT was developed in 2012 during a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust and Harvard University and describes the most common types of contributions to scholarly work in the biomedical field and in science more broadly. Since then, it has been adopted by a number of well-known publishers, including Wiley, Springer, and of course Elsevier and Cell Press.