Themes

Authorship criteria

What is this about?

A well known criteria of authorship states that an author must have contributed substantially to a work’s: conception or design;data acquisition, analysis or interpretation;intellectual content development or critical review;final version approval;and integrity, ensuring that issues related to the accuracy or completeness of any part of the work are properly investigated and resolved.1

Why is this important?

A successful career for researchers is often equivalent to the production and acceptance of peer-reviewed manuscripts. In fact, the number of publications a researcher has is commonly used as a parameter for career progression or funding acquisition.

Authorship matters because the entire research and publication process relies on trust. Authorship conveys significant privileges, responsibilities, and legal rights, and it is fair that only those who have actively participated in the work should benefit from the positive aspects of being an author and being accountable for all aspects of the research.

Although the general guidelines on authorship are common sense, the pressure to be a productive scholar and problems resulting from different interpretations of the general guidelines have encouraged a number of questionable research practices. These include honorary authorship, gift authorship, prestige authorship, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, citation amnesia, multiple submissions and duplicate publication.

For whom is this important?

phd students

The Embassy Editorial team, The Embassy editorial team, Iris Lechner, Mohammad Hosseini, Vicko Tomić, Anna Catharina Armond contributed to this theme. Latest contribution was Mar 25, 2021

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