At one time it was possible to list whoever you wanted as an author, no matter how tenuous their link was – or wasn’t – to a project or publication. However, with the rise of the hyperauthored paper, papers with more than 100 authors, organisations such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) have called for greater transparency when naming authors.
To be named as an author, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommends that each person meet four 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.
While there’s still a place for hyperauthored papers, most often in physics and epidemiology, the ICMJE criteria provide an aid to greater author transparency and accountability in publishing.
You’ll find that the Author Guidelines for a journal will typically include a statement of their expectations of who can be named as an author. However, even if authorship isn’t explicitly stated in the guidelines, the ICMJE criteria provide a great place to start the conversation within a project team about who can and should reasonably expect to be named as an author.
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