How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Definition of authorship
How to list the authors and addresses
Preparing the text

The list of authors establishes accountability as well as credit.

—National Academies Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy

Definition of authorship

The list of authors should include all those, and only those, who substantially contributed to the overall conceptualization, design, execution, and interpretation of the research. It should not include those without considerable contributions—whether to please them, help advance their careers, or try to impress editors, referees, or readers. Nor should it omit those whose contributions merit authorship. In other words, as described by the Council of Science Editors (2020), there should be no gift authors, guest authors, or ghost authors.

Colleagues and supervisors should not ask to have their names on manuscripts reporting research with which they themselves have not been intimately involved. Nor should they allow their names to appear on such manuscripts. Some individuals listed without valid reason have come to regret their inclusion when the reported research was found deficient or even fraudulent.

Each listed author should have made an important contribution to the study being reported, with the word important referring to those aspects of the study that produced new information, the concept that defines an original scientific paper. Qualification for authorship should be based on contribution, not on rank or stage of education.

An author of a paper should take intellectual responsibility for the research results being reported. However, this point must be tempered by realizing that modern science in many fields is collaborative and multidisciplinary. It may be unrealistic to assume that all authors can defend all aspects of a paper written by contributors from a variety of disciplines. Even so, authors should be held fully responsible for their choice of colleagues. In general, all those listed as authors should have been involved enough to defend the paper or a substantial aspect thereof.

Admittedly, deciding on authorship is not always easy. It is often incredibly difficult to analyze the intellectual input into a paper. Certainly, those who have worked together intensively for months or years on a research problem might have difficulty in remembering who had the original research concept or whose brilliant idea was the key to the success of the experiments. And what do these colleagues do when everything suddenly falls into place as a result of a searching question by the traditional “guy (or gal) in the next lab” who had nothing whatever to do with the research?

(ScienceCartoonsPlus.com)

With the increase in collaborative research, the number of authors per paper has tended to rise. In some fields, it is not rare to see 10 or more authors listed at the head of a paper. For example, a paper by F. Bulos and others (Phys. Rev. Letters 13:486, 1964) had 27 authors and only 12 paragraphs. Such papers sometimes come from laboratories that are so small that 10 people couldn’t fit into the lab, let alone make a meaningful contribution to the experiment. Occasionally, huge collaborations yield papers with hundreds of authors. A paper on fruit-fly genomics listed more than 1,000 authors (Woolston 2015), and a physics paper listed more than 5,000 (Castelvecchi 2015). (A confession: We did not count the listed authors ourselves. Nor were we cruel enough to inflict the task on a graduate student. Rather, we relied on counts reported as news items in Nature.)

To repeat, the scientific paper should list as authors only those who contributed substantially to the work. Unjustified listing of multiple authors adversely affects the real investigators and can lead to bibliographic nightmares. For more on issues relating to the definition of authorship, see Davidoff (2000), Claxton (2005), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2019), and Council of Science Editors (2020).