Authorship of articles in scholarly publications

The complete and accurate listing of authors on articles in scholarly publications is an ethical issue that deserves attention. In addition to ensuring the precise data, conflicts of interest, and other elements of your article, making sure that your author list is correct is an important part of publication ethics. Transparency in all areas is critical, and that includes the naming of authors. Readers must be able to count on your list being accurate; every person on it contributed and no one was omitted.

Around the year 1920, author listings began to change. Before that time, the model was “one paper, one author,” but then the number of contributors began to increase. In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published a clinical trial comprising 41,000 patients. This article had 972 authors and involved 1081 hospitals.¹ In 2015, a physics journal published a paper about measuring the mass of the Higgs Boson. This article had 5154 authors. The difference between that and the “one author” model of the 1920s and earlier is considerable. The inflated numbers of writers we see now could be called “Hyperauthorship.”²

Why is Hyperauthorship Happening?

Everyone wants to be an author. The reasoning goes beyond simple vanity. The “Publish or Perish” model is quite real; many people need to publish to advance their careers, and colleagues have sometimes agreed to list their friends, even if they don’t qualify. On the other hand, many of the longer lists of authors are legitimate as a result of the increase in multicenter studies. The ethical burden must therefore fall on the contributors to determine who meets the standard of authorship; it is important that researchers understand the threshold for authorship and who should and should not be included on the article’s author list.

Author lists are sometimes inflated by what can be called “gift” or “guest” authorship.³ This occurs when people who do not fulfill the authorship criteria are listed, presumably as a courtesy. Sometimes institutions have had a tradition of including the department head, even when he or she was not a part of the article. Fellows or early-career professionals may even feel pressure to include a mentor or advisor on an author list to further their career prospects.

Another common occurrence is “ghost authorship,” in which someone who contributed substantially to an article is left off the author list. This sometimes happens when a researcher has moved on to another institution before the article is submitted, and the remaining authors decide to omit him or her. That, of course, should not happen. Perhaps a more common kind of ghost authorship occurs when one of the contributors is an employee of the company that makes the device being tested; the others may fear that including this person along with the accurate conflicts of interest will make the reader question their data as possibly being biased. However, these omissions are unethical. Readers deserve to know exactly who worked on each article, and it is the authors’ responsibility to be transparent.

Who Should be Listed as Authors and when Should the Decisions Be Made?

Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and VideoGIE use the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) as guides for all ethical issues. For determining authorship, the journals rely on the list of criteria published by the ICMJE, repurposed here in a checklist (Fig. 1).⁴

Figure 1.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations for authorship, repurposed as a checklist.

According to the ICMJE, the decision of who will be listed as an author should ideally take place early, during the planning process for the study. Another decision that should be made at this time is the order of authors—who will be listed first? Last? Who will be the corresponding author? Making these decisions before the actual study begins can avoid disagreements later.

If 2 people think they qualify to be listed first, many journals, including GIE and VideoGIE, will add asterisks by the names, along with a footnote stating that both individuals contributed equally to the article, which is picked up by PubMed. Both people, then, are recognized as first authors.

When someone agrees to be the corresponding author, they need to be made aware of the responsibilities inherent in that job (gathering each person’s conflicts of interest; ensuring the correct spelling of names and accurate affiliations and degrees; submitting the article via the journal’s submission system; becoming a point of contact between the other writers and the journal office; guiding the revision process; becoming the liaison between the authors and the Publisher; disseminating or handling any materials sent to them, eg, the invoice with an open access journal and copyright forms; receiving proofs and turning them around quickly after reading them thoroughly; and recognizing that he or she is ultimately responsible for any errors that appear in print that were missed in proofs). The corresponding author is truly an important position that should not be entered into lightly.

Limits on Author Numbers

The Author Instructions of many journals specify limits on the number of authors allowed for various article types. For Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, for instance, the limit is 14 for Original Articles, 10 for New Methods, and 5 for Focal Points. However, the instructions also say that exceptions can be made. When we get that query, we direct them to the ICMJE instructions and ask them to submit, along with their article, a document specifically labeling which ICMJE criteria each author fulfills. If all of those listed truly qualify, then the Editors usually agree to include them.

Another way to shorten very long author lists is to use the title of the group, with the individuals spelled out in an appendix. If the exercise of going through the ICMJE criteria reveals names of people who should not be authors but you still want to mention their work on the article, those people can be placed in an acknowledgement, contributorship, or collaboration statement, which can be published with the article.

Conclusion

Many issues should concern conscientious writers of articles in scholarly publications, and ethics should be near the top of that list. Determining accurate authorship is a critical ethical issue that affects both researchers and readers. We advise following the ICMJE criteria for defining those roles. An important part of ethics is being completely honest, not only with data, but also with the information of who did (and did not) work to create and disseminate those data.

Disclosure

All authors disclosed no financial relationships relevant to this publication.