Definitions of Author & Contributor / PDF

MEDICC Review’s guidelines for determining authorship are based on the (ICJME) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals, relevant portions of which are cited below, edited only for style.

Author
• An Author is someone who complies with ALL the following four conditions:

1) makes substantial contribution to conception and design, or data acquisition, or analysis and interpretation of data,
2) drafts the article or reviews it critically for important intellectual content,
3) approves the final version of the manuscript, and
4) takes responsibility for all aspects of the work, guaranteeing appropriate investigation and resolution of any issues related to accuracy, reliability and integrity of any part of the work.

Not an author
• Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.

Group authorship
• Group authorship is an option when there are many authors.
• All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.
• Increasingly, authorship of multicenter trials is attributed to a group. When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript.
• The group should identify the individual who signs the Author Agreement on its behalf.
• The National Library of Medicine indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript.
• The corresponding author should clearly identify the group name, all individual authors and the preferred citation. Editors will ask authors to complete journal-specific author and conflict of interest disclosure forms. MEDICC Review requires the declaration of personal contribution of each author as part of the Author Agreement.

Byline
• The order of authorship on the byline should be a joint decision of the coauthors. Authors should be prepared to explain the order in which authors are listed.

Contributor
• All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgments section.
• Examples include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.
• Groups of persons who have contributed materially to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be listed under a heading such as “clinical investigators” or “participating investigators,” and their function or contribution should be described—for example, “served as scientific advisors,” “critically reviewed the study proposal,” “collected data,” or “provided and cared for study patients.”
• Because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions, all persons must give written permission to be acknowledged.