Abstract

Malai Muttarak
Department of Radiology, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Publication has become the essential achievement for academic promotion, accessibility to funding, and applying for a job. There is the potential for misconduct about authorship e.g. duplicate articles, salami publications, plagiarism, and multiple authorships. Hence, we need to define who has the right to be recognised as an author and what the responsibilities are when one gets this recognition.

Criteria for authorship
The guidelines of authorship form by a self-appointed group of editors known as the Vancouver Group or International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE):

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should be based on substantial contributions to 1) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of the data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2 and 3 must all be met. All those who qualify should be listed.

Although the ICMJE guidelines for authorship have become extremely important, problems with authorship still remain. Proposed solutions have been replaced by an alternative system of contributors and guarantors. Author should provide a description of what each contributed, and editors should publish that information. All others who contribute the work who are not authors should be named in the Acknowledgements, and what they did should be described.

The order of authors on the byline should be a joint decision of the coauthors. Authors should be prepared to explain the order in which authors are listed. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.

Acknowledgements
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed here. Examples include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or department head or chairman who provides only general support. Financial and material should be acknowledged.

Group of persons who have contributed materially to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be listed under heading such as “clinical investigators” or “participating investigators”, and their function or contribution described. Examples include “served as scientific advisors,” “collected data,” “critically reviewed the study proposal,” or “ provided and care for study patients”.

Because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions, all persons must give written permission to be acknowledged.