research papers co author

What roles Co-author and Corresponding Author play in Research Papers

Introduction

In current academic research, nothing exists in isolation. Good research requires collaboration, thus giving rise to the guild of co-authors and corresponding authors. These terms often raise questions about their significance and differences. Let’s delve into the distinctions between co-authors and corresponding authors, their roles, and how to appropriately mention the corresponding author in a paper.

Co-author vs. Corresponding Author: Unveiling the Differences

Co-author Meaning

• A co-author is a researcher who has contributed significantly to a research paper, sharing responsibility for its content and findings.
• Co-authors collaborate to design experiments, analyze results, and contribute to the overall intellectual content of the paper.

Corresponding Author Meaning

• The corresponding author is the designated point of contact for the paper. They facilitate communication with the journal, handle revisions, and address queries.
• The corresponding author isn’t necessarily the primary contributor but takes on administrative responsibilities.

How to Mention the Corresponding Author in a Paper

• Typically, the corresponding author’s name and contact information are provided at the top of the first page of the paper.
• Including an asterisk (*) next to the corresponding author’s name and explaining their role in a footnote is common practice.
• Mention the corresponding author’s email address for efficient communication.

Co-author vs. Second Author: Clarifying the Distinction

• Co-author: Holds equal responsibility for the content contributed substantially.
• Second Author: Holds a significant role but might not have been as involved as co-authors.

Who Should Be the Corresponding Author?

• Usually, the corresponding author is a senior researcher who can effectively handle communication.
• The corresponding author need not be the primary author; any co-author familiar with the research can take on this role.

Differences Between Co-author and Corresponding Author

• Responsibility : Co-authors share content responsibility; the corresponding author manages communication.
• Involvement : Co-authors are deeply involved in research; the corresponding author handles administrative aspects.
• Listing : All co-authors are listed in the byline; only the corresponding author’s contact details are visible.
• Primary Contribution : Co-authors contribute intellectually; the corresponding author manages logistics.

Main Author vs. Corresponding Author: Unraveling the Contrast

• Main Author : Often referred to as the first author, contributes significantly to research and writing.
• Corresponding Author : Handles communication, edits, and revisions after accepting the paper.

Collaborative Writing: Can Two Authors Pen a Book Together?

• Multiple authors can co-write a book, combining their expertise and perspectives.

The Merits of Being a Co-author

• Learning Opportunity : Co-authoring exposes you to diverse ideas and research methods.
• Networking : Collaboration connects you with other researchers in your field.
• Shared Workload : Co-authors distribute the research and writing burden.

Conclusion: Navigating the Authorship Landscape

Understanding the roles of co-authors and corresponding authors is vital in the intricate realm of academic authorship. Collaborative efforts enrich research and foster academic growth. As you embark on research journeys, remember the unique contributions of co-authors and the crucial responsibilities shouldered by corresponding authors. So, cheer up if you are a co-author or corresponding author; your contributions to this evolving knowledge domain are unparalleled.

Explore, Collaborate, and Illuminate. Connect with us at Manuscriptedit.com .

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Open Access

Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper

* E-mail: [email protected]

¶ ‡ MAF is the lead author. All authors contributed equally to this work. Besides for MAF, author order was computed randomly.

Affiliation Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

Affiliation Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

Affiliation Marine Institute, Furnace, Newport, Co. Mayo, Ireland

Affiliation Center for Environmental Research, Education and Outreach, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, United States of America

Affiliation UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Department of Lake Research, Magdeburg, Germany

Affiliation Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Affiliation Department of Biology, Pomona College, Claremont, California, United States of America

Affiliation Department of Ecology and Genetics/Limnology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Affiliation Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, United States of America

Affiliation Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States of America

Affiliation Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA), Girona, Spain

• Marieke A. Frassl, 
• David P. Hamilton, 
• Blaize A. Denfeld, 
• Elvira de Eyto, 
• Stephanie E. Hampton, 
• Philipp S. Keller, 
• Sapna Sharma, 
• Abigail S. L. Lewis, 
• Gesa A. Weyhenmeyer, 

Published: November 15, 2018

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006508
• Reader Comments

Citation: Frassl MA, Hamilton DP, Denfeld BA, de Eyto E, Hampton SE, Keller PS, et al. (2018) Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper. PLoS Comput Biol 14(11): e1006508. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006508

Editor: Fran Lewitter, Whitehead Institute, UNITED STATES

Copyright: © 2018 Frassl et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This work was supported by the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON; www.gleon.org ). ML and PK received the GLEON student travel fund. GW was supported by the Swedish Research Council, Grant No. 2016-04153. NC had the support of the Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral programme (BP-2016-00215). PK was supported by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, grant SP 1570/1-1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Science is increasingly done in large teams [ 1 ], making it more likely that papers will be written by several authors from different institutes, disciplines, and cultural backgrounds. A small number of “Ten simple rules” papers have been written on collaboration [ 2 , 3 ] and on writing [ 4 , 5 ] but not on combining the two. Collaborative writing with multiple authors has additional challenges, including varied levels of engagement of coauthors, provision of fair credit through authorship or acknowledgements, acceptance of a diversity of work styles, and the need for clear communication. Miscommunication, a lack of leadership, and inappropriate tools or writing approaches can lead to frustration, delay of publication, or even the termination of a project.

To provide insight into collaborative writing, we use our experience from the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) [ 6 ] to frame 10 simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper. We consider a collaborative multi-authored paper to have three or more people from at least two different institutions. A multi-authored paper can be a result of a single discrete research project or the outcome of a larger research program that includes other papers based on common data or methods. The writing of a multi-authored paper is embedded within a broader context of planning and collaboration among team members. Our recommended rules include elements of both the planning and writing of a paper, and they can be iterative, although we have listed them in numerical order. It will help to revisit the rules frequently throughout the writing process. With the 10 rules outlined below, we aim to provide a foundation for writing multi-authored papers and conducting exciting and influential science.

Rule 1: Build your writing team wisely

The writing team is formed at the beginning of the writing process. This can happen at different stages of a research project. Your writing team should be built upon the expertise and interest of your coauthors. A good way to start is to review the initial goal of the research project and to gather everyone’s expectations for the paper, allowing all team members to decide whether they want to be involved in the writing. This step is normally initiated by the research project leader(s). When appointing the writing team, ensure that the team has the collective expertise required to write the paper and stay open to bringing in new people if required. If you need to add a coauthor at a later stage, discuss this first with the team ( Rule 8 ) and be clear as to how the person can contribute to the paper and qualify as a coauthor (Rules 4 and 10 ). When in doubt about selecting coauthors, in general we suggest to opt for being inclusive. A shared list with contact information and the contribution of all active coauthors is useful for keeping track of who is involved throughout the writing process.

In order to share the workload and increase the involvement of all coauthors during the writing process, you can distribute specific roles within the team (e.g., a team leader and a facilitator [see Rule 2 ] and a note taker [see Rule 8 ]).

Rule 2: If you take the lead, provide leadership

Leadership is critical for a multi-authored paper to be written in a timely and satisfactory manner. This is especially true for large, joint projects. The leader of the writing process and first author typically are the same person, but they don’t have to be. The leader is the contact person for the group, keeps the writing moving forward, and generally should manage the writing process through to publication. It is key that the leader provides strong communication and feedback and acknowledges contributions from the group. The leader should incorporate flexibility with respect to timelines and group decisions. For different leadership styles, refer to [ 7 , 8 ].

When developing collaborative multi-authored papers, the leader should allow time for all voices to be heard. In general, we recommend leading multi-authored papers through consensus building and not hierarchically because the manuscript should represent the views of all authors ( Rule 9 ). At the same time, the leader needs to be able to make difficult decisions about manuscript structure, content, and author contributions by maintaining oversight of the project as a whole.

Finally, a good leader must know when to delegate tasks and share the workload, e.g., by delegating facilitators for a meeting or assigning responsibilities and subleaders for sections of a manuscript. At times, this may include recognizing that something has changed, e.g., a change in work commitments by a coauthor or a shift in the paper’s focus. In such a case, it may be timely for someone else to step in as leader and possibly also as first author, while the previous leader’s work is acknowledged in the manuscript or as a coauthor ( Rule 4 ).

Rule 3: Create a data management plan

If not already implemented at the start of the research project, we recommend that you implement a data management plan (DMP) that is circulated at an early stage of the writing process and agreed upon by all coauthors (see also [ 9 ] and https://dmptool.org/ ; https://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk/ ). The DMP should outline how project data will be shared, versioned, stored, and curated and also details of who within the team will have access to the (raw) data during and post publication.

Multi-authored papers often use and/or produce large datasets originating from a variety of sources or data contributors. Each of these sources may have different demands about how data and code are used and shared during analysis and writing and after publication. Previous articles published in the “Ten simple rules” series provide guidance on the ethics of big-data research [ 10 ], how to enable multi-site collaborations through open data sharing [ 3 ], how to store data [ 11 ], and how to curate data [ 12 ]. As many journals now require datasets to be shared through an open access platform as a prerequisite to paper publication, the DMP should include detail on how this will be achieved and what data (including metadata) will be included in the final dataset.

Your DMP should not be a complicated, detailed document and can often be summarized in a couple of paragraphs. Once your DMP is finalized, all data providers and coauthors should confirm that they agree with the plan and that their institutional and/or funding agency obligations are met. It is our experience within GLEON that these obligations vary widely across the research community, particularly at an intercontinental scale.

Rule 4: Jointly decide on authorship guidelines

Defining authorship and author order are longstanding issues in science [ 13 ]. In order to avoid conflict, you should be clear early on in the research project what level of participation is required for authorship. You can do this by creating a set of guidelines to define the contributions and tasks worthy of authorship. For an authorship policy template, see [ 14 ] and check your institute’s and the journal’s authorship guidelines. For example, generating ideas, funding acquisition, data collection or provision, analyses, drafting figures and tables, and writing sections of text are discrete tasks that can constitute contributions for authorship (see, e.g., the CRediT system: http://docs.casrai.org/CRediT [ 15 ]). All authors are expected to participate in multiple tasks, in addition to editing and approving the final document. It is debated whether merely providing data does qualify for coauthorship. If data provision is not felt to be grounds for coauthorship, you should acknowledge the data provider in the Acknowledgments [ 16 ].

Your authorship guidelines can also increase transparency and help to clarify author order. If coauthors have contributed to the paper at different levels, task-tracking and indicating author activity on various tasks can help establish author order, with the person who contributed most in the front. Other options include groupings based on level of activity [ 17 ] or having the core group in the front and all other authors listed alphabetically. If every coauthor contributed equally, you can use alphabetical order [ 18 ] or randomly assigned order [ 19 ]. Joint first authorship should be considered when appropriate. We encourage you to make a statement about author order (e.g., [ 19 ]) and to generate authorship attribution statements; many journals will include these as part of the Acknowledgments if a separate statement is not formally required. For those who do not meet expectations for authorship, an alternative to authorship is to list contributors in the Acknowledgments [ 15 ]. Be aware of coauthors’ expectations and disciplinary, cultural, and other norms in what constitutes author order. For example, in some disciplines, the last author is used to indicate the academic advisor or team leader. We recommend revisiting definitions of authorship and author order frequently because roles and responsibilities may change during the writing process.

Rule 5: Decide on a writing strategy

The writing strategy should be adapted according to the needs of the team (white shapes in Fig 1 ) and based on the framework given through external factors (gray shapes in Fig 1 ). For example, a research paper that uses wide-ranging data might have several coauthors but one principal writer (e.g., a PhD candidate) who was conducting the analysis, whereas a comment or review in a specific research field might be written jointly by all coauthors based on parallel discussion. In most cases, the approach that everyone writes on everything is not possible and is very inefficient. Most commonly, the paper is split into sub-sections based on what aspects of the research the coauthors have been responsible for or based on expertise and interest of the coauthors. Regardless of which writing strategy you choose, the importance of engaging all team members in defining the narrative, format, and structure of the paper cannot be overstated; this will preempt having to rewrite or delete sections later.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Different writing strategies ranging from very inclusive to minimally inclusive: group writing = everyone writes on everything; subgroup writing = document is split up into expertise areas, each individual contributes to a subsection; core writing group = a subgroup of a few coauthors writes the paper; scribe writing = one person writes based on previous group discussions; principal writer = one person drafts and writes the paper (writing styles adapted from [ 20 ]). Which writing strategy you choose depends on external factors (filled, gray shapes), such as the interdisciplinarity of the study or the time pressure of the paper to be published, and affects the payback (dashed, white shapes). An increasing height of the shape indicates an increasing quantity of the decision criteria, such as the interdisciplinarity, diversity, feasibility, etc.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006508.g001

For an efficient writing process, try to use the active voice in suggestions and make direct edits rather than simply stating that a section needs revision. For all writing strategies, the lead author(s) has to ensure that the completed text is cohesive.

Rule 6: Choose digital tools to suit your needs

A suitable technology for writing your multi-authored paper depends upon your chosen writing approach ( Rule 5 ). For projects in which the whole group writes together, synchronous technologies such as Google Docs or Overleaf work well by allowing for interactive writing that facilitates version control (see also [ 21 ]). In contrast, papers written sequentially, in parallel by subsections, or by only one author may allow for using conventional programs such as Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. In any case, you should create a plan early on for version control, comments, and tracking changes. Regularly mark the version of the document, e.g., by including the current date in the file name. When working offline and distributing the document, add initials in the file name to indicate the progress and most recent editor.

High-quality communication is important for efficient discussion on the paper’s content. When picking a virtual meeting technology, consider the number of participants permitted in a single group call, ability to record the meeting, audio and visual quality, and the need for additional features such as screencasting or real-time notes. Especially for large groups, it can be helpful for people who are not currently speaking to mute their microphones (blocking background noise), to use the video for nonverbal communication (e.g., to show approval or rejection and to help nonnative speakers), or to switch off the video when internet speeds are slow. More guidelines for effective virtual meetings are available in Hampton and colleagues [ 22 ].

In between virtual meetings, virtual technologies can help to streamline communication (e.g., https://slack.com ) and can facilitate the writing process through shared to-do lists and task boards including calendar features (e.g., http://trello.com ).

With all technologies, accessibility, ease of use, and cost are important decision criteria. Note that some coauthors will be very comfortable with new technologies, whereas others may not be. Both should be ready to compromise in order to be as efficient and inclusive as possible. Basic training in unfamiliar technologies will likely pay off in the long term.

Rule 7: Set clear timelines and adhere to them

As for the overall research project, setting realistic and effective deadlines maintains the group’s momentum and facilitates on-schedule paper completion [ 23 ]. Before deciding to become a coauthor, consider your own time commitments. As a coauthor, commit to set deadlines, recognize the importance of meeting them, and notify the group early on if you realize that you will not be able to meet a deadline or attend a meeting. Building consensus around deadlines will ensure that internally imposed deadlines are reasonably timed [ 23 ] and will increase the likelihood that they are met. Keeping to deadlines and staying on task require developing a positive culture of encouragement within the team [ 14 ]. You should respect people’s time by being punctual for meetings, sending out drafts and the meeting agenda on schedule, and ending meetings on time.

To develop a timeline, we recommend starting by defining the “final” deadline. Occasionally, this date will be set “externally” (e.g., by an editorial request), but in most cases, you can set an internal consensus deadline. Thereafter, define intermediate milestones with clearly defined tasks and the time required to fulfill them. Look for and prioritize strategies that allow multiple tasks to be completed simultaneously because this allows for a more efficient timeline. Keep in mind that “however long you give yourself to complete a task is how long it will take” [ 24 ] and that group scheduling will vary depending on the selected writing strategy ( Rule 5 ). Generally, collaborative manuscripts need more draft and revision rounds than a “solo” article.

Rule 8: Be transparent throughout the process

This rule is important for the overall research project but becomes especially important when it comes to publishing and coauthorship. Being as open as possible about deadlines ( Rule 7 ) and expectations (including authorship, Rule 4 ) helps to avoid misunderstandings and conflict. Be clear about the consequences if someone does not follow the group’s rules but also be open to rediscuss rules if needed. Potential consequences of not following the group’s rules include a change in author order or removing authorship. It should also be clear that a coauthor’s edits might not be included in the final text if s/he does not contribute on time. Bad experience from past collaboration can lead to exclusion from further research projects.

As for collaboration [ 2 ], communication is key. During meetings, decide on a note taker who keeps track of the group’s discussions and decisions in meeting notes. This will help coauthors who could not attend the meeting as well as help the whole group follow up on decisions later on. Encourage everyone to provide feedback and be sincere and clear if something is not working—writing a multi-authored paper is a learning process. If you feel someone is frustrated, try to address the issue promptly within the group rather than waiting and letting the problem escalate. When resolving a conflict, it is important to actively listen and focus the conversation on how to reach a solution that benefits the group as a whole [ 25 ]. Democratic decisions can often help to resolve differing opinions.

Rule 9: Cultivate equity, diversity, and inclusion

Multi-authored papers will likely have a team of coauthors with diverse demographics and cultural values, which usually broadens the scope of knowledge, experience, and background. While the benefit of a diverse team is clear [ 14 ], successfully integrating diversity in a collaborative team effort requires increased awareness of differences and proactive conflict management [ 25 ]. You can cultivate diversity by holding members accountable to equity, diversity, and inclusivity guidelines (e.g., https://www.ryerson.ca/edistem/ ).

If working across cultures, you will need to select the working language (both for verbal and written communications); this is most commonly the publication language. When team members are not native speakers in the working language, you should always speak slowly, enunciate clearly, and avoid local expressions and acronyms, as well as listen closely and ask questions if you do not understand. Besides language, be empathetic when listening to others’ opinions in order to genuinely understand your coauthors’ points of view [ 26 ].

When giving verbal or written feedback, be constructive but also be aware of how different cultures receive and react to feedback [ 27 ]. Inclusive writing and speaking provide engagement, e.g., “ we could do that,” and acknowledge input between peers. In addition, you can create opportunities for expression of different personalities and opinions by adopting a participatory group model (e.g., [ 28 ]).

Rule 10: Consider the ethical implications of your coauthorship

Being a coauthor is both a benefit and a responsibility: having your name on a publication implies that you have contributed substantially, that you are familiar with the content of the paper, and that you have checked the accuracy of the content as best you can. To conduct a self-assessment as to whether your contributions merit coauthorship, start by revisiting authorship guidelines for your group ( Rule 4 ).

Be sure to verify the scientific accuracy of your contributions; e.g., if you contributed data, it is your responsibility that the data are correct, or if you performed laboratory or data analyses, it is your responsibility that the analyses are correct. If an author is accused of scientific misconduct, there are likely to be consequences for all the coauthors. Although there are currently no clear rules for coauthor responsibility [ 29 ], be aware of your responsibility and find a balance between trust and control.

One of the final steps before submission of a multi-authored paper is for all coauthors to confirm that they have contributed to the paper, agree upon the final text, and support its submission. This final confirmation, initiated by the lead author, will ensure that all coauthors have considered their role in the work and can affirm contributions. It is important that you repeat the confirmation step each time the paper is revised and resubmitted. Set deadlines for the confirmation steps and make clear that coauthorship cannot be guaranteed if confirmations are not done.

When writing collaborative multi-authored papers, communication is more complex, and consensus can be more difficult to achieve. Our experience shows that structured approaches can help to promote optimal solutions and resolve problems around authorship as well as data ownership and curation. Clear structures are vital to establish a safe and positive environment that generates trust and confidence among the coauthors [ 14 ]. The latter is especially challenging when collaborating over large distances and not meeting face-to-face.

Since there is no single “right approach,” our rules can serve as a starting point that can be modified specifically to your own team and project needs. You should revisit these rules frequently and progressively adapt what works best for your team and the project.

We believe that the benefits of working in diverse groups outweigh the transaction costs of coordinating many people, resulting in greater diversity of approaches, novel scientific outputs, and ultimately better papers. If you bring curiosity, patience, and openness to team science projects and act with consideration and empathy, especially when writing, the experience will be fun, productive, and rewarding.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Meredith Holgerson and Samantha Oliver for their input in the very beginning of this project. We thank the Global Lake Observatory Network (GLEON), which has provided a trustworthy and collaborative work environment.

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Defining authorship in your research paper

Co-authors, corresponding authors, and affiliations, quick links, why does authorship matter.

Authorship gives credit and implies accountability for published work, so there are academic, social and financial implications.

It is very important to make sure people who have contributed to a paper, are given credit as authors. And also that people who are recognized as authors, understand their responsibility and accountability for what is being published.

There are a couple of types of authorship to be aware of.

Co-author Any person who has made a significant contribution to a journal article. They also share responsibility and accountability for the results of the published research.

Corresponding author If more than one author writes an article, you’ll choose one person to be the corresponding author. This person will handle all correspondence about the article and sign the publishing agreement on behalf of all the authors. They are responsible for ensuring that all the authors’ contact details are correct, and agree on the order that their names will appear in the article. The authors also will need to make sure that affiliations are correct, as explained in more detail below.

Open access publishing

There is increasing pressure on researchers to show the societal impact of their research.

Open access can help your work reach new readers, beyond those with easy access to a research library.

How common is co-authorship and what are the challenges collaborating authors face? Our white paper  Co-authorship in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A global view explores the experiences of 894 researchers from 62 countries.

If you are a named co-author, this means that you:

Made a significant contribution to the work reported. That could be in the conception, study design, execution, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, or in all these areas.

Have drafted or written, substantially revised or critically reviewed the article.

Have agreed on the journal to which the article will be submitted.

Reviewed and agreed on all versions of the article before submission, during revision, the final version accepted for publication, and any significant changes introduced at the proofing stage.

Agree to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the article. Share responsibility to resolve any questions raised about the accuracy or integrity of the published work.

Every submission to our medical and health science journals should comply with the International Committee on Medical Journal Ethics’  definition of authorship .

Please include any other form of specific personal contribution in the acknowledgments section of your paper.

Affiliations: get it right

Your affiliation in the manuscript should be the institution where you conducted the research. You should also include details of any funding received from that institution.

If you have changed affiliation since completing the research, your new affiliation can be acknowledged in a note. We can’t normally make changes to affiliation after the journal accepts your article.

Changes to authorship

Authorship changes post-submission should only be made in exceptional circumstances, and any requests for authors to be removed or added must be in line with our authorship criteria.  

If you need to make an authorship change, you will need to contact the Journal Editorial Office or Editorial team in the first instance. You will be asked to complete our Authorship Change request form ; all authors (including those you are adding or removing) must sign this form. This will be reviewed by the Editor (and in some instances, the publisher). 

Please note any authorship change is at the Editor’s discretion; they have the right to refuse any authorship change they do not believe conforms with our authorship policies. 

Some T&F journals do not allow any authorship changes post-submission; where this is applicable, this will be clearly indicated on the journal homepage or on the ‘instructions for authors’ page. 

If the corresponding author changes before the article is published (for example, if a co-author becomes the corresponding author), you will need to write to the editor of the journal and the production editor. You will need to confirm to them that both authors have agreed the change.

Requested changes to the co-authors or corresponding authors following publication of the article may be considered, in line with the  authorship guidelines issued by COPE , the Committee on Publication Ethics. Please  see our corrections policy  for more details. Any requests for changes must be made by submitting the completed  Authorship Change Request form .

Authorship Change Request form

Important: agree on your corresponding author and the order of co-authors, and check all affiliations and contact details before submitting.

Taylor & Francis Editorial Policies on Authorship

The following instructions (part of our  Editorial Policies ) apply to all Taylor & Francis Group journals.

Corresponding author

Co-authors must agree on who will take on the role of corresponding author. It is then the responsibility of the corresponding author to reach consensus with all co-authors regarding all aspects of the article, prior to submission. This includes the authorship list and order, and list of correct affiliations.

The corresponding author is also responsible for liaising with co-authors regarding any editorial queries. And, they act on behalf of all co-authors in any communication about the article throughout: submission, peer review, production, and after publication. The corresponding author signs the publishing agreement on behalf of all the listed authors.

AI-based tools and technologies for content generation

Authors must be aware that using AI-based tools and technologies for article content generation, e.g. large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT), is not in line with our authorship criteria.

All authors are wholly responsible for the originality, validity and integrity of the content of their submissions. Therefore, LLMs and other similar types of tools do not meet the criteria for authorship.

Where AI tools are used in content generation, they must be acknowledged and documented appropriately in the authored work.

Changes in authorship

Any changes in authorship prior to or after publication must be agreed upon by all authors – including those authors being added or removed. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to obtain confirmation from all co-authors and to provide a completed Authorship Change Request form to the editorial office.

If a change in authorship is necessary after publication, this will be amended via a post-publication notice. Any changes in authorship must comply with our criteria for authorship. And requests for significant changes to the authorship list, after the article has been accepted, may be rejected if clear reasons and evidence of author contributions cannot be provided.

Assistance from scientific, medical, technical writers or translators

Contributions made by professional scientific, medical or technical writers, translators or anyone who has assisted with the manuscript content, must be acknowledged. Their source of funding must also be declared.

They should be included in an ‘Acknowledgments’ section with an explanation of their role, or they should be included in the author list if appropriate.

Authors are advised to consult the  joint position statement  from American Medical Writers Association (AMWA), European Medical Writers Association (EMWA), and International Society of Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP).

Assistance with experiments and data analysis

Any significant contribution to the research reported, should be appropriately credited according to our authorship criteria.

If any parts of the research were outsourced to professional laboratories or to data analysts, this should be clearly stated within the manuscript, alongside an explanation of their role. Or, they should be included in the author list if appropriate.

Authors are responsible for retaining all of the original data related to their work, and should be prepared to share it with the journal editorial office if requested.

Acknowledgments

Any individuals who have contributed to the article (for example, technical assistance, formatting-related writing assistance, translators, scholarly discussions which significantly contributed to developing the article), but who do not meet the criteria for authorship, should be listed by name and affiliation in an ‘Acknowledgments’ section.

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What does co-authorship mean and who gets to be one?

In the Laskowski Lab, we believe that co-authorship should be an outgoing discussion throughout the life of a research project. To us, co-authorship represents both credit for work done on the project and also, just as importantly, responsibility for the contents of the resulting paper. This does not mean that every co-author should necessarily have a detailed understanding of each method or technique, but it does mean that they should have a broad understanding of the contents of the paper and the major decisions that were made to produce the results. On highly collaborative projects, each co-author may have a deeper or shallower understanding of certain parts of a paper, based on their contributions. For example, one co-author was responsible for writing the code that extracts behavioral variables from videos; this co-author will have a deep understanding of that method. And while this co-author might not be expected to understand the details of how a particular brain imaging protocol was performed, they should understand what protocol was used and what data were collected from the protocol. 

Co-authorship decisions .

Because of the dual role of co-authorship in that it confers both credit and responsibility, there is no single rule that can fully cover all scenarios where co-authorship decisions need to be made. But we find that the general guideline that a person should to contribute to at least two key aspects of any project/paper to be a good starting point for discussions about inclusion as a co-author: 

• Research question development
• Experimental design or methodology development
• Data collection
• Data processing and analysis
• Manuscript writing
• Providing funding for the specific project
• Significant and constructive feedback on written drafts

That said, if any project component would not have been possible without the contributions of a particular person, or if they have made a very significant investment in any one project component, then that may be reason alone to include them as a co-author, assuming they are willing to hold responsibility for the contents of the paper. Regardless of contribution, all co-authors are always expected to read and approve the submitted version of the manuscript. 

Discussions about co-authorship should happen early on and with regularity throughout a project. It is the responsibility of the project lead to discuss co-authorship options with people that are contributing to the project. For example, if two undergraduate students are assisting in data collection with a graduate student, this contribution alone (i.e. data collection) would not necessarily warrant co-authorship. However, the graduate student can explain to the undergraduate students about the roles and responsibilities of co-authorship and the undergraduate students may then become more actively involved in other aspects of the project such as analysis or writing and editing. As another example, simply providing general funding for a project participant (e.g. a PI that provides funding for a postdoc’s position) does not automatically assume co-authorship for the funder as these funds were not specific to the project. 

Author order.

Once co-authorship is agreed upon, the next step is determining author order. In our field (ecology and evolution) the positions that generally carry the most weight are the first and last authors. In addition to author order, corresponding authorship is a role that any co-author can take.

Typically, but not always, the first author is the project lead and is generally the person that writes the initial draft of the manuscript. Co-first authors could be possible in some cases, for example, when two people have equal significant contributions to the study. Typically, but not always, the last author is an advisor that helps guide the first author and rest of the team of higher-level decisions. Finally, the corresponding author is the person who will handle communication about the manuscript during the submission process and will ultimately be the person contacted by anyone with questions about the paper. They hold perhaps the most responsibility for the paper in the long term and usually the corresponding author will be either the first or last author on the paper. Determining co-author positions and roles can be difficult as many projects often have more than two people that significantly contributed to that project and so discussions of author order should occur early in the process. However, author order is never set in stone and further discussions should happen any time there is any change in co-author contributions, such as when a particular co-author may contribute more or less than what was initially discussed.

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What is a Corresponding Author?

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Are you familiar with the terms “corresponding author” and “first author,” but you don’t know what they really mean? This is a common doubt, especially at the beginning of a researcher’s career, but easy to explain: fundamentally, a corresponding author takes the lead in the manuscript submission for publication process, whereas the first author is actually the one who did the research and wrote the manuscript.

The order of the authors can be arranged in whatever order suits the research group best, but submissions must be made by the corresponding author. It can also be the case that you don’t belong in a research group, and you want to publish your own paper independently, so you will probably be the corresponding author and first author at the same time.

Corresponding author meaning:

The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process. Normally, he or she also ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors.

Generally, corresponding authors are senior researchers or group leaders with some – or a lot of experience – in the submission and publishing process of scientific research. They are someone who has not only contributed to the paper significantly but also has the ability to ensure that it goes through the publication process smoothly and successfully.

What is a corresponding author supposed to do?

A corresponding author is responsible for several critical aspects at each stage of a study’s dissemination – before and after publication.

If you are a corresponding author for the first time, take a look at these 6 simple tips that will help you succeed in this important task:

• Ensure that major deadlines are met
• Prepare a submission-ready manuscript
• Put together a submission package
• Get all author details correct
• Ensure ethical practices are followed
• Take the lead on open access

In short, the corresponding author is the one responsible for bringing research (and researchers) to the eyes of the public. To be successful, and because the researchers’ reputation is also at stake, corresponding authors always need to remember that a fine quality text is the first step to impress a team of peers or even a more refined audience. Elsevier’s team of language and translation professionals is always ready to perform text editing services that will provide the best possible material to go forward with a submission or/and a publication process confidently.

Who is the first author of a scientific paper?

The first author is usually the person who made the most significant intellectual contribution to the work. That includes designing the study, acquiring and analyzing data from experiments and writing the actual manuscript. As a first author, you will have to impress a vast group of players in the submission and publication processes. But, first of all, if you are in a research group, you will have to catch the corresponding author’s eye. The best way to give your work the attention it deserves, and the confidence you expect from your corresponding author, is to deliver a flawless manuscript, both in terms of scientific accuracy and grammar.

If you are not sure about the written quality of your manuscript, and you feel your career might depend on it, take full advantage of Elsevier’s professional text editing services. They can make a real difference in your work’s acceptance at each stage, before it comes out to the public.

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How to Handle Co-authorship When Not Everyone’s Research Contributions Make It into the Paper

Gert helgesson.

1 Stockholm Centre for Healthcare Ethics (CHE), Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Zubin Master

2 Biomedical Ethics Research Program and Center for Regenerative Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN USA

William Bülow

3 Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Associated Data

Not applicable.

While much of the scholarly work on ethics relating to academic authorship examines the fair distribution of authorship credit, none has yet examined situations where a researcher contributes significantly to the project, but whose contributions do not make it into the final manuscript. Such a scenario is commonplace in collaborative research settings in many disciplines and may occur for a number of reasons, such as excluding research in order to provide the paper with a clearer focus, tell a particular story, or exclude negative results that do not fit the hypothesis. Our concern in this paper is less about the reasons for including or excluding data from a paper and more about distributing credit in this type of scenario. In particular, we argue that the notion ‘substantial contribution’, which is part of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) authorship criteria, is ambiguous and that we should ask whether it concerns what ends up in the paper or what is a substantial contribution to the research process leading up to the paper. We then argue, based on the principles of fairness, due credit, and ensuring transparency and accountability in research, that the latter interpretation is more plausible from a research ethics point of view. We conclude that the ICMJE and other organizations interested in authorship and publication ethics should consider including guidance on authorship attribution in situations where researchers contribute significantly to the research process leading up to a specific paper, but where their contribution is finally omitted.

Introduction

Research typically proceeds in less predictable ways than we like to acknowledge. While a scientific ideal is that every part of a study is well considered and planned beforehand, and the research process thereafter mainly consists in performing according to protocol, a typical experience from the field is that such description is far from the truth. Planning and execution of plans are rarely that straightforward. To the contrary, many decisions are made along the way regarding both data collection and analysis: new experiments, comparisons, interviews, and surveys may be decided as the work proceeds, and additional analyses may be added to the ones originally decided upon. Sometimes these changes are driven by peer review. Some of the research contributions eventually pass critical scrutiny and make it into the paper, while others for one reason or another end up in the waste bin or are shelved for possible future use.

There may be positive as well as negative things to say about such practice in relation to the philosophy of science and meta science, relating to curiosity and creativity on the one hand and hypothesis testing and reproducibility issues on the other. Furthermore, some of the choices made regarding what results get included in papers may be objectionable from a research ethics perspective, such as excluding ‘negative results’ because they contradict the main results of the paper or are considered unworthy of publication, hence contributing to the positive publication bias (Chalmers et al., 1990 ; Connor, 2008 ; Dirnagl & Lauritzen, 2010 ). Other exclusions may be fully acceptable, based on estimations of relevance and the consideration that you cannot include everything in the paper if it is to be readable.

The present paper does not deal with what exclusions of research results are acceptable or not, but with a related issue, namely how to handle authorship attributions in papers where plans change along the way, so that some of the results derived are not included in the final version of the paper. This topic is a special case of the larger topic of who should be included as authors on research papers, which involves ethical aspects like appropriate allocation of credit in research (and, hence, fairness), transparency and accountability (Shamoo & Resnik, 2009 ). Given the frequency of authorship disagreements (Marušić et al., 2011 ; Nylenna et al., 2014 ; Okonta & Rossouw, 2013 ), this analysis is important also because good authorship practices serve to foster positive team dynamics and collaboration and are less likely to lead to authorship disputes, which could impact interpersonal and professional relationships and possibly lead to subsequent misbehaviors (Smith et al., 2020 ; Tijdink et al., 2016 ).

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has produced the most widely acknowledged authorship recommendations, which serve as guidance for the biomedical sciences among other areas of scholarship (ICMJE, 2019 ). The recommendations provide a set of criteria that are jointly necessary and sufficient in order to determine authorship (see Box ​ Box1). 1 ). While these authorship criteria have met their due share of criticism (Laflin et al. 2005 ; Osborne & Holland, 2009 ; Puljak & Sambunjak, 2000 ; Smith et al. 2014 ), we find them reasonable, although not flawless (see e.g. Helgesson & Eriksson, 2018 ; Helgesson et al 2019 ). We therefore treat the ICMJE criteria as the starting point for our discussion of whether granting authorship to someone can be justified even when that person’s specific contributions do not make it into the final version of the manuscript. However, the problem we have identified, having to do with the first criterion–that authors should have made a ‘substantial contribution’ to the work–is not clearly addressed by the ICMJE recommendations. In fact, the problem is overlooked by most suggestions for how to think about the allocation of authorship in co-researched papers (see e.g., Shamoo & Resnik, 2009 ; Hansson, 2017 ; Moffatt, 2018 ).

ICMJE Authorship recommendations

Hence, the aim of this paper is to determine, in relation to the ICMJE authorship criteria, how authorship should be handled in situations where researchers have contributed substantively to the research and drafting of the manuscript, but the results themselves are not included in the final manuscript. Before we discuss this issue in greater detail, we would like to flesh out the problem by providing a case.

A Case of Omitted Results

To recognize the problem we have in mind, consider the following case: Two senior researchers and three junior researchers work together on a study. One of the senior researchers take the main responsibility for conception and design of the study and assume the role of principal investigator (PI), while the other senior researcher helps substantially with suggestions and input regarding specific analyses, and also provides support in the lab, where the empirical data is obtained. The empirical work is divided among the three junior researchers Ann, Bo, and Choi in such a way that they are individually fully responsible for some part of the design and conducting the lab work, resulting in data collection, analysis and interpretation of results. As times passes, Ann, Bo, and Choi all spend many hours working hard and eventually deliver according to plan. When looking at the results and discussing the study further, all researchers on the team agree on the contents of the paper. It turns out that while the analyses made by Ann and Bo fit well with the final idea of the paper, Choi’s analyses fall outside the scope of the narrative eventually decided upon and are therefore at the end not included. This is where the discussion starts in the group. Should Choi be included as co-author? She will surely do her part in revising the manuscript and approve the final version to satisfy the second and third ICMJE criteria, but did she make a ‘substantial contribution’ to the work under the first criterion of the ICMJE recommendations? Choi has contributed to discussions throughout the life of the project at team meetings and did help in the design of her part of the experiments and conducted those studies, collected and analyzed the data, and helped interpret the results. However, she was unable to contribute to the overall conception and design of the project at this early stage of her career, similar to Ann and Bo. On an honest estimation, it can be concluded that she has not made a substantial contribution to the paper if the excluded results, her main contribution, do not make it into the final manuscript. So what to do?

Before we move on, let us notice that there are several possible reasons for not including Choi’s contribution in the paper. One reason could be that the quality of her work is too low. Another reason could be that her results are relevant but do not support the overall thesis of the paper–they are in this respect so-called negative results. As we have already indicated, omitting negative results might be problematic from a research ethics perspective, especially if the reason for omitting them is that they contradict one’s hypothesis. 1 However, another reason for not including Choi’s contribution could be that the results are taken not to be relevant (or relevant enough) to the paper eventually decided upon, meaning that her results helped shape the final story being told in the paper but were not being reported in the publication. For the sake of argument, our discussion in what follows assumes that the reason for omitting Choi’s contribution is ethically sound and does not constitute a research misbehaviour in its own right.

Substantial Contribution and Intellectual Involvement

As noted in the introduction, the problem we describe concerns the first ICMJE criterion for authorship. This criterion does two things: it tells us the broad categories of contributions that count towards authorship on the byline (conception or design, acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data), and it tells us the extent of contribution needed, namely that the contribution(s) have to be ‘substantial.’ For the sake of argument, let us assume that Choi’s research contributions would clearly have been substantial enough to grant a position on the paper if her data and analyses had been included in the manuscript. Now if they are not included, does it mean that Choi should not be listed as an author? And if she should, how is this compatible with the idea of a substantial contribution?

We believe that situations like Choi’s reveal that the ‘substantial contribution’ requirement of the ICMJE recommendations is not only vague in terms of what is required for a contribution to be large enough to be substantial (Cutas & Shaw, 2015 ; Laflin et al. 2005 ; Osborne & Holland, 2009 ), but also ambiguous in terms of what specifically counts as a contribution. In particular, we hold that we should distinguish between two interpretations of this criterion, namely whether it concerns a substantial contribution to what ends up in the paper or whether it concerns a substantial contribution to the research process leading up to the paper . While Choi does not qualify as an author in the former sense, she might do so if we accept the latter interpretation of the substantial contribution criterion. The question remains which of the two interpretations of ‘substantial contribution’ is the most plausible one.

To be certain, making a substantial contribution is not enough to qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria. Critical revision and final approval of the manuscript outlined in the second and third ICMJE criteria is needed as well. The critical revision requires intellectual involvement in the paper under production. Hence, intellectual involvement in the research at hand is part of the ICMJE authorship requirements (Helgesson, 2015 ).

Before returning to our case, let us first present and consider another one in which the main point is to clearly show that one might make a substantial contribution to the research of a paper without contributing to what ends up in the paper. Assume that a group is writing a paper on research methods for accomplishing X in the research field of Z . They proceed by examining all existing methods mentioned in the literature potentially relevant for the specific purpose at hand, dividing the work among them so that each researcher involved analyzes the same number of methods each. The results from the analyses of the methods found to work are described at some length in the final paper, while failing methods are merely mentioned (although they are as completely documented by the research group). Since it is not known beforehand which methods will work and which ones will not, each analysis will be equally relevant to the fulfillment of the aim of the paper–to clarify the best methods to accomplish X . If the research contribution is substantial, and other authorship criteria are fulfilled, all researchers should be included as co-authors of the paper irrespective of whether their method is presented in the manuscript or not. Hence, there is a case to be made that substantial research contributions sometimes should count towards authorship even if they are not represented equally in the final paper.

Fairness, Transparency and Accountability

As previously detailed, we believe that cases like Choi’s reveal an ambiguity concerning the notion of ‘substantial contribution.’ It might be understood as saying that what is required is either a substantial contribution to what ends up in the paper or a substantial contribution to the research leading up to the paper. If the first interpretation is correct, then Choi should be excluded from authorship, despite the work and effort that she has put into this collaborative work. If Choi ought to be included in the paper, which we think she should, this is because it is enough, with respect to the first authorship criterion, that she has contributed in a substantial and relevant way to the research leading up to the paper, even if her specific empirical contributions did not end up in the paper. We will therefore defend this interpretation of the substantial contribution requirement of the ICMJE recommendations.

Generally, there are two sets of reasons for caring about how authorship is handled when a researcher makes a substantial contribution that is not reported in the manuscript. First, it is a matter of transparency and accountability about the research process: what happened and who were involved? From this perspective, it is misleading if people who were deeply involved in the work are not described in the paper. Also for reasons of accountability, those responsible for the work should be identifiable to others. Admittedly, both of these aspects could be fulfilled by some other means than that of attribution of authorship, such as a sufficiently detailed description of everyone’s contributions, including those not included as authors. But with present practices, including someone as co-author or merely listing that person in the contributor list or acknowledgements communicates two quite different messages about the person’s contribution and its relative importance. Our argument here for the interpretation that what counts as ground for co-authorship is a substantial contribution to the research leading to the paper is that excluding Choi would be misleading about her role in the project, hence not fulfilling the need for transparency and accountability.

Second, authorship is a matter of due scientific credit and fairness, which to our mind provides a strong reason for including Choi. In particular, our argument for the interpretation that what counts is a substantial contribution to the research leading to the paper is that excluding Choi seems unfair. After all, Choi has contributed as much to the research leading to the paper as her colleagues. Admittedly, the aim of the paper shifted, or took a form that made Choi’s contribution less relevant to what was reported in the paper, but not less relevant to the end product leading to the research publication. Also, we should note that this interpretation clearly ties Choi’s claim to authorship to the good work she has done rather than to the results being reported only. In contrast, if what is required is a substantial contribution to the research presented in the paper, then it seems that whether any of the junior researchers end up in the authorship byline will be, to some degree, a matter of luck , since neither an initial agreement or great efforts along the way is sufficient. This too seems unfair. Contributing with a considerable amount of good work and then not receiving authorship because of a change of plans seems unfair in a vein similar to misuse of the ICMJE authorship criteria by letting people contribute substantially to the work, then not offer them the opportunity to revise, and finally not include them as authors since they do not fulfill all criteria (ICMJE, 2019 ).

Counter Arguments

There are several possible counterarguments to our thesis that should be addressed. First, it might be argued that Choi’s contribution is rather general in its nature, and hence should not count towards authorship. After all, authorship is not about general research contributions, such as having contributed substantially to a large research application providing financial support for the production of many papers (reaching a level of detail that the application did not), but contributions to the specific paper (Smith & Master, 2017 ). Similarly, being a member of the research group does not mean that one should be included as co-author on every paper produced by the group. Instead, you need to contribute substantially to every paper in order to be listed as author. However, one may agree with the general thrust of this argument without agreeing that it works as an argument against including Choi. That is because it is an open question what should be meant by ‘contributions to the specific paper’–is it what the final version of the paper contains or is it the work specifically concerning and leading up to that paper? It seems to us that the better understanding of ‘research contribution’ is the work and intellectual engagement contributed in the context of a study or project around a specified research aim and/or a set of specified research questions, rather than what of that work was eventually included in the paper–as long as the work, as it was carried out, was perceived by the research group as relevant to what they were doing.

Second, one might ask why it would not be enough if Choi’s contribution were recognized through an acknowledgement, especially if it contains a clear statement of her contribution. Important contributions that do not qualify for authorship are often handled that way, so why shouldn’t we think that it is enough in this case? There are two connected responses to this inquiry. First, as already argued, Choi has made contributions qualifying her for authorship. Leaving her out would therefore be misleading in the sense that it would give a false impression about the relative value of her contribution to the research. Second, it would be utterly unfair to grant her an acknowledgement if her colleagues, making contributions of equal importance (according to our reasoning above), are included as authors. Again, as discussed above, allocation of authorship concerns transparency and accountability on the one hand, and credit and fairness on the other. Acknowledgements contribute to transparency, but are useless from a career perspective in most, if not all, research areas, hence leaving Choi with an inappropriate credit for her work. 2

Third, there is a complication with our interpretation of the substantial contribution requirement that we may call the multiplicity problem . Imagine that the overall thrust of our argument was followed by the research group and that Choi was included as co-author in the paper based on her substantial contributions to the work with the paper even though her work was not presented in the paper. Further imagine that later on, the senior researchers find it a good idea to include the previously excluded work by Choi in another paper where it becomes more relevant. The work then included is indeed substantial, which provides an argument why Choi should be included as co-author also in this second paper. But doesn’t this amount to an unfair form of double counting? In response, we think that it might be acceptable to include Choi as co-author on both papers, insofar as she fulfills the following two conditions: the contribution under the first criterion has to be different in the two papers (which is not the same thing as saying that the contribution has to concern different data sets), and the other ICMJE authorship criteria need to be fulfilled in relation to the second paper as well. Admittedly, Choi was not part of the research process, and perhaps not intellectually involved in the questions particularly addressed in this second paper, at an early stage. But once included with her empirical contribution (originally omitted and hence different from her contribution to the first paper), she could engage in the larger questions of this second paper and could contribute intellectually as well. For example, she could participate in the process of revising versions of the manuscript critically for important intellectual content, as put in the second criterion of the ICMJE authorship criteria. If so, then it seems right that she is included as an author also in the second paper since she fulfils criteria 1–4 in relation to that paper. 3

But then there seems to be a further complication with our account that we might call the backfire problem (which is a counter argument to our response to the multiplicity problem). Again, assume that Choi was included as an author on the first paper where her work was not presented in the paper itself, but that the work has also begun with the second paper based on Choi’s contribution. Ann and Bo now enter the scene and ask why they are not included in the second paper–should they be? After all, if Choi ought to be included as an author on the first paper, on the basis that her work with the omitted empirical contribution was an important part of the research process leading up to the first paper, then doesn’t this suggest that Ann and Bo can raise similar legitimate demands on being included as authors on the second paper? In response, we suggest that the answer can certainly not be a general ‘Yes,’ but that their inclusion in the second paper is justifiable if they were sufficiently involved in the second paper to be correctly described as having contributed substantially to the process leading up to that specific paper. For example, the second paper might be a natural follow-up of the first paper, covering further issues already considered while they were working on the first paper. 4 However, it all hinges on whether Ann and Bo contributed substantially, in the sense we have defended in the above.

Before concluding we should make two important remarks. First, our arguments in response to the multiplicity problem has important implications beyond the case that we are focusing on here. For example, when a biomedical researcher builds a new reagent and publishes it, the original creator does not (or at least should not) receive authorship recognition each and every time the reagent is shared and used by other scientists in subsequent studies. The reason for this, or so we would argue, is that merely providing certain substances or data is not enough to qualify as an author. What is important is rather that one has contributed substantially in the research process leading up to the paper. However, allowing people to use one’s innovation over and over does not guarantee the type of involvement required for authorship in a specific paper. Second, the focus of this paper has only been on authorship attribution, but cases like the one we discuss here also raise issues about authorship order, which is a contentious area with as yet no uniform policy or practice which guides researchers (Helgesson & Eriksson, 2019 ; Smith & Master, 2017 ). Addressing this issue is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.

Concluding Remarks

In this paper we have argued that authorship should be attributed to those who have made a substantial contribution to the specific research leading up to the publication, even if their particular contribution is not reported in the paper. Based on the principle of fairness and giving credit where credit is due, researchers who make significant contributions should be given authorship credit even if their contribution is not included in the final manuscript. We have argued that this practice is aligned with the most plausible interpretation of the first criterion of the ICMJE recommendations, and thus researchers should be afforded the opportunity to participate in fulfilling subsequent criteria including drafting or critically revising the manuscript, approving the final version of the paper, and agreeing to be accountable for the research. Based on our analysis, we suggest that ICMJE and others interested in authorship and publication ethics need to revise their proposals regarding authorship allocation for the sake of clarity.

As a suggestion for future research, further conceptual and empirical work in this area should examine and consider situations where substantive but excluded contributions deserve or not deserve authorship credit. While several studies examine gift authorship (e.g., Sauermann & Haeussler, 2017 ; Wislar et al 2011 ), less has been done to assess the nature and frequency of authorship exclusion, which is likely to be significant and affect those with less power in academic science (Cesi and Williams 2011; NASEM 2017).

Acknowledgements

ZM’s involvement in this research project was supported by CTSA Grant Number UL1 TR002377 from the National Cancer for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS).

Open access funding provided by Karolinska Institute. See Acknowledgements.

Availability of data and material

Code availability, declarations.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

1 There is much more to be said here. The handling of negative results has been discussed extensively in the research ethics literature, mainly in relation to selection bias when it comes to what studies get published and not. There are ethical issues involved here, relating to reasons for not publishing, such as researchers being misleading by withholding results, wasted resources, and introduction of bias into meta-analyses. The tendency to favor positive results is systemic (Chalmers, 1990 ; Duyx et al., 2017 ; Dwan et al., 2008 ; Fanelli, 2012 ; Song et al., 2000 ). Addressing these sorts of issues is beyond the scope of this paper, however, as our focus is to analyze the ethics of who should be included as authors in cases where not all work done has explicit impact on what ends up in print.

2 The fact that acknowledgements do not carry any weight from a career perspective might be a reason for ditching both acknowledgements and traditional author lists in favour of more detailed contributorship statements at the beginning of academic papers. Such a system would at best not only be more transparent, but also more accurate when it comes to the allocation of academic credit. That said, our argument here largely applies to the present situation, in which authorship is the norm.

3 We admit that our solution to the multiplicity problem still leaves open for disputes over authorship. After all, researchers might still disagree whether a particular contribution is sufficiently different from another one. That said, we still believe that what we say in response to the multiplicity problem is valid and should be adopted as a general starting point for how to handle this kind of disputes. Thus, we suggest that the principle is valid, even if the application of the principle can still be debated in individual cases.

4 We want to underline that we do not suggest that so-called salami-slicing should be acceptable. However, you do not get salami slicing just because you make more than one paper out of a data set. Salami slicing is if you separate your data into several papers merely in order to get more papers, not because it is justified for scientific considerations, such as making the content comprehensible and the story sufficiently clear for the reader to follow (not to mention managing limitations of space).

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How to co-author a research paper (tools included)

Tell me if this sounds like a familiar research paper co-authoring experience:

You write a manuscript for a research paper and send it to your two co-authors. The first co-author returns it with 258 edits and so many comments that their stacked length exceeds the length of the paper itself. For a mysterious reason, the automatic references have all converted to static text. Now you have to either re-write his edits in your version or start over with the references in his… Watching the grass grow would be more fun!

The second co-author of your paper is from a commercial company and she has to pass the manuscript by her superiors to make sure publishing the results is not in conflict with the company policy. OK, so you wait. Then write her a reminder. Then wait some more. Eventually, after another three weeks, you receive an email saying “We can’t publish Figure X because it is something that we would like to keep as a know-how of our company”. But the damn thing is the core of the whole paper! Why did you even spend all this time working on the manuscript!?

As the infomercials go: “There is got to be a better way!”

And there is a better way. In this article I will show you how to co-author a research paper in three simple steps. This will make you more effective in writing research papers and perhaps you will even enjoy the collaborations more.

How to co-author a research paper STEP 1: Have a meeting 

Often the first discussion between the co-authors of a research paper takes place after the main author has written the first draft. This is probably the greatest mistake in co-authoring a research paper. 

People tend to weigh written words heavier than spoken. If you immediately circle the first draft of a research paper, the co-authors might presume that the approach is settled and feel less able to impact the decisions. As a result, they might have less enthusiasm to contribute to the paper. 

Alternatively, if your co-authors are confident in their opinion and especially if they have a higher rank than you do, you are in danger of receiving a list of comments that will require you to rework large parts of the paper. 

There is a simple way to avoid these problems. Sit down together or have a video-call with the co-authors of your research paper to reach consensus before starting to write. Follow these four steps to make sure the meeting is as efficient as possible:

During the meeting, your first goal is to define a common understanding of what is the key message of the paper. If the co-authors were not intimately involved in the research, you, as the main author, should come prepared. Bring results and data charts ready for discussion. Have a logically derived opinion that you can present. Then encourage brainstorming to reach a consensus. 

Once you have defined the message, agree with the co-authors of your paper how it should be delivered – decide what data to include in the paper and how to best transmit the message visually through figures. Ideally, you should jointly write an outline of the Results and Discussion part of the paper. This can be one sentence for each significant result and may become the subsection headers later on. 

Before parting, decide who does what and set deadlines that everyone agrees with. This will keep the co-collaboration structured and efficient. It’s a good idea to also define the sequence of co-author authors on the published paper to avoid quarrels later. 

After the meeting, summarize and send the co-authors of your research paper a summary of the discussion via email. The written document will serve as a reminder of the jointly-made decisions and deadlines. 

How to co-author a research paper STEP 2: Put the manuscript in the cloud

I was once co-authoring a European-wide research project application with 15 participants from nine different countries. The main author must have spent mind-numbing hours merging the tracked changes from 15 different documents in a single file. 

Thankfully, it does not have to be this way. Collaborative writing tools allow co-authors of a research paper to work simultaneously on the same document. This will save a lot of time that you can spend actually thinking about the content of the paper, instead of working as a copy editor. 

Here are the best research paper co-authoring tools to use: 

Google Docs

Pros: Intuitive and easy to set up. The editors are not obliged to have an account; the author needs to have it.

Cons: Does not have a built-in reference manager. The formatting tends to break when exporting to MS Word. 

MS Word online

Pros: Familiar to everyone. The editors are not obliged to have an account; the author needs to have it.

Cons: The plug-in reference managers do not work. Limited formatting compared to Word.

Pros: It’s purposefully built for scientists and therefore includes many handy features, like citation tools, automatic formatting according to journal requirements, and many others. 

Cons: A steeper learning curve and everyone needs to create an account. 

Pros: It is a cloud storage not a text editor so you can share a document in any format. 

Cons: Everyone needs a Dropbox account to be efficient. Simultaneous editing can create parallel versions.

For even more academic writing tools check out this article.

How to co-author a research paper STEP 3: Push for progress 

If you have had a meeting before starting to write and this is not the first paper you author, there should be no need for more than one, a maximum of two rounds of content editing and perhaps one more for final proof-read by the co-authors. You, as the main author, should circulate emails about the status and push everyone to follow deadlines. 

In some cases, the co-authors of your paper might be very picky and send new edits every time you send them the “Final Version” . You end up with “Final Version 2” , “Final Version 3” and so on… If this is the case, you will have to take the leap and say when the manuscript is ready to be sent out. A good way to show your intentions is to send an email to your co-authors starting with “Please approve… “ instead of the “Please provide feedback…” . 

Finally, if nothing else works and there are still comments and conflicting opinions coming back from the co-authors, suggest to rely on the expertise of the journal reviewers.

Collaborative writing can work!

What would have happened to the collaboration we discussed at the beginning of this article if only the co-authors would have followed the process I just described?

The first co-author would have told most of his 258 suggestions during the initial meeting. You would have used them when preparing the first manuscript of the research paper and saved a lot of time on re-writing.  The automatic references would not have been messed up, because everyone would edit the document in the cloud. 

The paper co-author from the commercial company would see in the initial meeting which data you are planning to include in the paper and would have raised her concerns right away. During the meeting, you would have agreed on a plan B in case her superiors objects to publishing certain results. Finally, her own commitment to a firm deadline would have increased the chances that she actually follows it. 

Co-authoring a research paper and more broadly speaking – working together with peers can bring a lot of value to you as a researcher. You will learn about other projects, observe how your peers approach certain problems, learn from their way of writing research papers and build relationships with them. 

All you need is to get rid of some painful parts of collaborations and learn how to co-author a research paper efficiently. Then you will be able to fully enjoy the benefits. 

A guide for writing papers that get cited

Knowing how to write research papers can make the difference between being invited to apply for a tenure track position and sending out CVs to random professors in the hope of a miracle.

Hi! My name is Martins Zaumanis and in my interactive online course Research Paper Writing Masterclass I will show you how to write research papers efficiently using a four-step system called “LEAP”. You will learn to to  visualize  your research results,  frame a message  that convinces your readers, and write  each section  of the paper. Step-by-step.

And of course, you will see how to answer the infamous Reviewer No.2 🙂

Hey! My name is Martins Zaumanis and I am a materials scientist in Switzerland ( Google Scholar ). As the first person in my family with a PhD, I have first-hand experience of the challenges starting scientists face in academia. With this blog, I want to help young researchers succeed in academia. I call the blog “Peer Recognized”, because peer recognition is what lifts academic careers and pushes science forward.

Besides this blog, I have written the Peer Recognized book series and created the Peer Recognized Academy offering interactive online courses.

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Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors

Page Contents

• Why Authorship Matters
• Who Is an Author?
• Non-Author Contributors
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology

1. Why Authorship Matters

Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications. Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work. The following recommendations are intended to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.

Editors should be aware of the practice of excluding local researchers from low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) from authorship when data are from LMICs. Inclusion of local authors adds to fairness, context, and implications of the research. Lack of inclusion of local investigators as authors should prompt questioning and may lead to rejection.

Because authorship does not communicate what contributions qualified an individual to be an author, some journals now request and publish information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in a submitted study, at least for original research. Editors are strongly encouraged to develop and implement a contributorship policy. Such policies remove much of the ambiguity surrounding contributions, but leave unresolved the question of the quantity and quality of contribution that qualify an individual for authorship. The ICMJE has thus developed criteria for authorship that can be used by all journals, including those that distinguish authors from other contributors.

2. Who Is an Author?

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged—see Section II.A.3 below. These authorship criteria are intended to reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take responsibility for the work. The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3. Therefore, all individuals who meet the first criterion should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.

The individuals who conduct the work are responsible for identifying who meets these criteria and ideally should do so when planning the work, making modifications as appropriate as the work progresses. We encourage collaboration and co-authorship with colleagues in the locations where the research is conducted. It is the collective responsibility of the authors, not the journal to which the work is submitted, to determine that all people named as authors meet all four criteria; it is not the role of journal editors to determine who qualifies or does not qualify for authorship or to arbitrate authorship conflicts. If agreement cannot be reached about who qualifies for authorship, the institution(s) where the work was performed, not the journal editor, should be asked to investigate. The criteria used to determine the order in which authors are listed on the byline may vary, and are to be decided collectively by the author group and not by editors. If authors request removal or addition of an author after manuscript submission or publication, journal editors should seek an explanation and signed statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author to be removed or added.

The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process. The corresponding author typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and disclosures of relationships and activities are properly completed and reported, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer-review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way, and should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication. Although the corresponding author has primary responsibility for correspondence with the journal, the ICMJE recommends that editors send copies of all correspondence to all listed authors.

When a large multi-author group has conducted the work, the group ideally should decide who will be an author before the work is started and confirm who is an author before submitting the manuscript for publication. All members of the group named as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, including approval of the final manuscript, and they should be able to take public responsibility for the work and should have full confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the work of other group authors. They will also be expected as individuals to complete disclosure forms.

Some large multi-author groups designate authorship by a group name, with or without the names of individuals. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should specify the group name if one exists, and clearly identify the group members who can take credit and responsibility for the work as authors. The byline of the article identifies who is directly responsible for the manuscript, and MEDLINE lists as authors whichever names appear on the byline. If the byline includes a group name, MEDLINE will list the names of individual group members who are authors or who are collaborators, sometimes called non-author contributors, if there is a note associated with the byline clearly stating that the individual names are elsewhere in the paper and whether those names are authors or collaborators.

3. Non-Author Contributors

Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g. "Clinical Investigators" or "Participating Investigators"), and their contributions should be specified (e.g., "served as scientific advisors," "critically reviewed the study proposal," "collected data," "provided and cared for study patients," "participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript").

Because acknowledgment may imply endorsement by acknowledged individuals of a study’s data and conclusions, editors are advised to require that the corresponding author obtain written permission to be acknowledged from all acknowledged individuals.

Use of AI for writing assistance should be reported in the acknowledgment section.

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology

At submission, the journal should require authors to disclose whether they used artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the production of submitted work. Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the submitted work in the appropriate section if applicable, how they used it. For example, if AI was used for writing assistance, describe this in the acknowledgment section (see Section II.A.3). If AI was used for data collection, analysis, or figure generation, authors should describe this use in the methods (see Section IV.A.3.d). Chatbots (such as ChatGPT) should not be listed as authors because they cannot be responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, and these responsibilities are required for authorship (see Section II.A.1). Therefore, humans are responsible for any submitted material that included the use of AI-assisted technologies. Authors should carefully review and edit the result because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. Authors should not list AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author, nor cite AI as an author. Authors should be able to assert that there is no plagiarism in their paper, including in text and images produced by the AI. Humans must ensure there is appropriate attribution of all quoted material, including full citations.

Next: Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial Relationships and Activities, and Conflicts of Interest

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Authorship , Co-Authoring and Collaborating

• First Online: 08 October 2023

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• Jacqui Ewart   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5907-6032 2  

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This chapter addresses a series of issues that are amongst the most rewarding, but also the most fraught and the most difficult with which to deal. They are: authorship, co-authoring, and sharing data. The benefits, pitfalls and perils of collaborating are explored. Every academic will have a different approach to dealing with these matters. Deciding early on in your career how you are going to manage these requests from others to co-author will help you avoid some of the perils, while capitalising on the enormous benefits of working with someone you respect and trust. The rules of authorship are explored along with protocols that will help you to avoid being ‘ripped off’, mistreated and having the wool pulled over your eyes by someone who has more power than you or who mounts a seemingly convincing argument as to why their name should go first on a co-authored article, when you did all the hard intellectual slog associated with it. It explores the general principles of fairness, recognition of intellectual input and being ethical when co-authoring. This chapter explains the importance of being aware of and familiarising yourself with your institution’s policies and procedures when it comes to co-authoring. Being able to cite the relevant policies and procedures can be of great assistance when dealing with problematic co-authors.

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Australia, Universities. (2018a). Collaborative research: A guide supporting the Australian code for the responsible conduct of research . Commonwealth of Australia.

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Brabazon, T. (2019). Vlog 177: Authorship . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z0FOoiRjOo . Accessed 5 July 2022.

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Ewart, J. (2023). Authorship , Co-Authoring and Collaborating . In: Planning your Academic Publishing Journey. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5902-0_5

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• Agreeing to and signing the Author Publishing Agreement on behalf of relevant coauthors and/or arranging for any third-party copyright owners’ signature;
• Arranging for payment of an APC (article processing charge) where one is required or requesting a discretionary waiver if necessary. The affiliation(s) of the corresponding author may be used to determine eligibility for discounted or waived APCs under transformative agreements and author equity initiatives;
• Acting on behalf of all co-authors in responding to queries from all sources post-publication, including questions relating to publishing ethics, reuse of content, or the availability of data, materials, resources etc.

Can the corresponding author change once assigned? Please ensure the corresponding author is correct at submission. Any change in authorship (including order and designations such as corresponding author) requires the written agreement of all manuscript authors, and may be subject to review in line with the relevant COPE guidelines ( click here for more information ). After an article has published online, any authorship changes will be accompanied by a relevant notice (correction, retraction, expression of concern).

Do all journals use corresponding authors? Not all disciplines have a tradition of using corresponding authors, particularly disciplines where there are only one or two authors. However, the affiliation of a corresponding author is generally used to determine eligibility for open access article fee funding under transformative agreements by both publishers and institutions, so we require a corresponding author to be declared for all articles.

Do I have to check with my institution before declaring who corresponding author is? The corresponding author should be the person who is most appropriate to fulfil the responsibilities outlined above. We are aware, however, that this might not always be the most advantageous choice in terms of benefiting from transformative agreement funding . For this reason, and for best practice around authorship generally, we recommend article authorship, affiliation information and designation of the corresponding author is discussed and agreed as early as possible in the research process to minimise the risk of misunderstandings and disputes.

How does the designated corresponding author affect Open Access Agreement eligibility?

Eligibility to publish under a transformative open access agreement is based on the corresponding author’s institution – which is provided at manuscript submission – as well as the article type, and is subject to the institution’s confirmation of eligibility.

Note that the date of manuscript acceptance must be during the term date of the transformative agreement in order for the manuscript to be eligible to publish under the agreement.

Any article affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated. 

Further help

If you have any questions relating to open access agreements with your institution (Transformation Agreements), please visit our information page or contact [email protected] . To find out if you're eligible for an Open Access waiver or discount, please use our  checker tool .

If you have questions about authorship or corrections policies, please read our publishing ethics policy or contact [email protected]

Collaborative Writing: How to Write a Scientific Paper with Collaborators & Co-Authors

Are you dreading writing that research paper with your scientific collaborators? Have you had awful experiences with authorship disputes or endless rounds of revising a manuscript? Here’s a system to make the collaborative writing process enjoyable and efficient for everyone.

If you have published a scientific paper, chances are you weren’t the only author. Research is no longer done by lone wolves but rather a collaborative effort. You might have co-authored a piece with your supervisor, your PhD or undergraduate students, a PostDoc or whole groups of collaborators. Whether your research collaboration is overseas or across the corridor, you’ve probably felt the challenges of working on a manuscript with a group of people.

In this blog post, I’m sharing collaborative writing strategies with you that make sure your collaborative paper a) gets written efficiently, b) won’t make you hate your collaborators and c) becomes that stellar piece you had in mind when you set up the scientific collaboration. Here’s what we will cover:

• The collaborative writing process (3 crucial steps and questions to discuss with your co-authors)
• Collaborative writing strategies
• Case studies illustrating what collaborative writing can feel like when done right
• Conclusions on this article on collaborative writing and what to do next

The collaborative writing process

There are three crucial checkpoints at which you should have a discussion with the members of your research collaboration: At the start of the collaboration, before you start writing the paper and after the first paper draft is completed.

I will walk you through what to discuss at each checkpoint below so that your collaborative writing goes smoothly.

Here is an overview what the ideal collaborative writing process looks like:

• Step: Set the premises for your research collaboration
• Step: Plan the collaborative paper writing
• Step: Revise the co-written scientific paper

Let’s look at each point specifically.

1. STEP: Set the premises for your research collaboration

There are some things you best discuss way before you are writing up the findings of your research collaboration. Ideally, you and your collaborators should have a meeting at the very start of your project and agree on these crucial points:

Who owns the collaborative writing project?

What is every co-author’s responsibility, what is the timeline for the paper, how will your research collaboration communicate.

Here’s what to discuss for each point in detail:

The owner of the project is the one who is responsible for keeping the project on track, following up with the members of the collaboration, arranging meetings… They will likely be the corresponding (and/or first or last) author of the manuscript. This role does not need to be a principal investigator (PI) – in fact, most early-career researchers will probably appreciate the role and get lots of valuable project management experience out of it.

Every member of the research collaboration should have a specific task they can be held accountable for. This could be a certain part of the lab work, supervision of a certain task etc.

The timeline of the project is best discussed from the start. When should the compound be synthesised and when are the simulation results due? Make sure every collaborator has enough available time in their schedule to complete their task. It surely is hard to estimate when the whole project will be finished or the paper submitted. Nevertheless, I recommend agreeing on an end date because it helps everyone to keep on track and stay motivated.

Every member should specify by what means they would like to communicate. The default here is probably email but do consider platforms such as Slack. It allows you to create polls, upload documents and discuss topics in threads. Just a note of warning: They can speed up communication but they can also become a huge time waster. In order to use Slack or similar tools efficiently I suggest defining how often you expect everyone to check their messages and reply.

And even if you choose email as the communication tool of your research collaboration, agree on acceptable response times and for what type of discussions to schedule a synchronous meeting instead.

 Does collaborative writing for a high-impact journal feel intimidating? Partly because you’ve never received proper academic writing training? In this free online training, Dr Anna Clemens introduces you to her template to write papers in a systematic fashion with your co-authors . Click the orange button below to watch now or to save for later.

2. STEP: PLAN THE COLLABORATIVE PAPER WRITING

Once your scientific collaboration yielded promising results that you would like to write up in a research paper, it’s time to have another meeting with your co-authors. Resist the urge to start writing the scientific paper immediately!

Now is the time to discuss the collaborative writing process. The points of discussion are similar to those at your initial meeting with some crucial adjustments and additions:

• What is the order of authorship?
• Who’s in charge of writing what?
• Who has the final word?
• What’s the timeline for the paper?
• What’s the story of the co-written paper?
• What is your target journal?
• Which collaborative writing tools are you going to use?

Here’s what to discuss.

WHAT IS THE ORDER OF AUTHORSHIP?

Reassess if it still makes sense to keep the project owner in their role. It might be that the research shifted focus and that it would make more sense now for another member of the group to direct the collaborative writing process.

It makes sense that the project owner is either the first or last and possibly corresponding author — this also depends on the conventions in your research field. In addition to the responsibilities of the project owner outlined earlier, they should also be in charge of compiling the pieces of writing from various collaborators into one uniform manuscript and submitting it.

Now is also a good time to agree on the remaining order of authors. If you struggle with this, check out this guide by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and these tips from Naturejobs.

WHO’S IN CHARGE OF WRITING WHAT?

Who’s writing which part of the scientific paper? Remember to discuss with your scientific collaborators the Introduction and Discussion sections in particular, as they likely need real collaborative effort. You may want to schedule further meetings to discuss the content and structure of those sections.

WHO HAS THE FINAL WORD?

Who among the collaborators will have the power to decide, e.g. what title , abstract and conclusions you are going with?  

WHAT’S THE TIMELINE FOR THE PAPER?

Now is a good time to revise your collaborative writing plan (if you haven’t yet): In what time frame could any remaining research be completed? What should the deadlines be for the different members of the research collaboration to finish their part of the writing? When do you expect to have a first draft?

WHAT’S THE STORY OF THE CO-WRITTEN PAPER?

All of the collaborators should agree on and be aware of the story you want to tell in your scientific paper. Inside the Researchers’ Writing Academy, our academic writing course , we provide you with a template that helps you define all elements of the story of your scientific paper easily. I highly recommend to have the story of your co-written paper saved in a separate document that is accessible to all members of your research collaboration.

Encourage your co-authors to have this story document opened up or printed out whenever they are writing their part of the paper to make sure the resulting paper is telling a coherent story!

WHAT IS YOUR TARGET JOURNAL?

Do make a decision about your target journal BEFORE anyone on your scientific collaboration starts writing. The choice of target journal determines your story (see above), the selection of data to include, the lengths of sections, the word count of abstract, title etc. Not choosing a target journal at this stage of your collaborative writing process will mean that you will spend more time editing the completed draft. Anyone who has ever experienced an editing nightmare with their co-authors knows that that’s better to be avoided! I recommend clearly stating the target journal on the story document mentioned above.

WHICH COLLABORATIVE WRITING TOOLS ARE YOU GOING TO USE?

Decide on one writing program everyone in the research collaboration will use so that the person who is compiling the different parts of the paper isn’t overly burdened with converting Latex scripts into a Word doc or vice versa. There also exist a number of collaborative writing tools such as Authorea and OverLeaf. Easy options for writing with several co-authors are Google Docs or Word Online.

3. STEP: REVISE THE CO-WRITTEN SCIENTIFIC PAPER

Once the project owner has received all parts from the different collaborators and compiled the paper into one draft, it’s a good idea to meet up with the members of your scientific collaboration again. Here are the decisions you need to make:

• Who will edit the paper for coherence?
• How will you incorporate revisions from co-authors?
• How will you deal with conflicting opinions?

Let’s go over each point.

WHO WILL EDIT THE PAPER FOR COHERENCE?

Should the project owner/first/last author or another collaborator be responsible for editing the draft so that it is concise and coherent? Or are you going to hire an external editor to do this?

HOW WILL YOU INCORPORATE REVISIONS FROM CO-AUTHORS?

In what order should the co-authors read and comment on the draft? How should the comments, changes and edits be submitted to the project owner? A common option is to ask every co-author to switch on track-changes if you work in Word. It’s easy to see the changes an author has made and whether the owner wants to accept or reject them. Some prefer to get a list of the suggested changes from their co-authors so they can implement the edits themselves.

HOW WILL YOU DEAL WITH CONFLICTING OPINIONS?

The project owner should take all suggestions from members of your research collaboration into account. Instead of ignoring suggestions that the project owner doesn’t agree with, it’s better to seek discussion with the co-author. If you can’t come to an agreement, the topic should be opened up to all members of the scientific collaboration.

COLLABORATIVE WRITING STRATEGIES

Finally, a few additional strategies that will help you manage the collaborative writing process efficiently.

TAKE MEETING NOTES

When you meet with your research collaboration partners and co-authors – be it in person or virtually – have someone take minutes. The project owner should update the timeline, responsibilities etc based on the minutes.

USE PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

There is project management software out there, which you might want to check out. If you have never worked with programs like this, I recommend starting to look into Trello or Notion, which don’t require much project management experience and are fairly easy to set up.

However, setting up a project management systems can be a time-consuming undertaking, and it might just overcomplicate things for your collaborative writing. So, consider wisely if this would be a good investment for your research collaboration.

AGREE ON THE FINAL DRAFT

Every co-author should read the final draft before the paper is submitted. The project owner should make clear to all co-authors that this isn’t the time for big structural changes or even copy-editing. Only proof-reading (correcting typos, spelling, grammar) is permitted in this final read-through.

COLLABORATIVE WRITING DONE RIGHT — CASE STUDIES

Making collaborative writing more efficient is our jam. Inside the Researchers’ Writing Academy, we teach researchers a whole system to develop, write and finalise a scientific paper with their co-authors time-efficiently. I want you to meet two researchers who were able to transform their collaborative writing process.

COLLABORATIVE WRITING CASE STUDY OLUWATOYOSI A. ONWUEMENE, M.D.

First, meet Oluwatoyosi A. Onwuemene, MD, who is Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center in the US. Here is what she said after implementing the collaborative writing strategies we teach inside the Researchers’ Writing Academy:

“I am an excellent writer and have been writing and submitting manuscripts for a while.”

”However, the Researchers’ Writing Academy significantly improved my process of engaging with and receiving feedback from my co-authors. ”

“The particular breakthrough I received in the Researchers’ Writing Academy was with regard to the necessary work prior to writing, especially with regard to creating an outline prior to committing to a full manuscript.”

“It sounds like a simple intervention; but it really changed the way I interact with my co-authors. It has cut down significantly on major edits of fully written manuscripts and allows me to fully engage co-authors early on in the manuscript-writing process. Now there is less confusion and fewer surprises during the writing process! ”

COLLABORATIVE WRITING CASE STUDY JIA NG, MD

Next, please meet Jia Ng, MD, who is an Assistant Professor at the Zucker School of Medicine in the US. Here’s what she says:

“I used to approach academic writing as something tedious that I needed to do.

Since being a member of the Researchers’ Writing Academy, I can write a draft in four weeks .”

COLLABORATIVE WRITING — CONCLUSION

There you have it: A checklist for each stage of the collaborative writing process including some essential collaborative writing strategies and case studies illustrating how collaborative writing can feel when done right. Hopefully, this helps to make collaborative writing a more joyful experience for everyone on your research collaboration!

If you want to learn the complete system to write collaborative papers time-efficiently, including how to develop your story, how to structure each section of your research paper and how to stay accountable, check out our free writing class. 👇

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Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Authorship in Scientific and Scholarly Work Products

• What roles and responsibilities do authors have when producing a scientific or scholarly work?
• I am working on a large project with colleagues from different disciplines; how do I know who is an “author” when our contributions to the manuscript are so varied?
• I provide administrative funds to support this scientific or scholarly work—why am I not listed as an author?
• As a Principal Investigator on a group project, when should I discuss authorship of any scientific works we are planning to publish?
• I am a researcher and was directed to perform a lot of basic work on a project. My supervisor drafted a manuscript but did not include me as an author. Don’t I merit being designated as an author?
• A senior scientist in my laboratory insists on being included as an author on every manuscript that comes out of the laboratory, even those he/she is not substantially involved in. I am happy to acknowledge support, but does he/she qualify as an author?
• Some technicians on my project provide substantial intellectual contributions to the work, but others simply operate equipment and produce basic data. Do I need to list all of them as authors on my publication?
• I use the same method in my different projects; it is impossible to describe the technique without using the same phrases. Is it considered self-plagiarism to use the same language over again?
• I would like to submit my recently published work (with slight variations) to other venues for distribution as a new work product. Is that acceptable?
• I am a junior researcher, and I know that adding a well-known scientist as a co-author on my manuscript will increase the likelihood that a prestigious journal will accept it for publication. Is it acceptable to add his/her name as a co-author without explicitly involving them in the work?
• In collaboration with a partner in the private sector, we are preparing a scientific work for publication. Our partners have been extensively involved in the project and meet the conditions for authorship. However, they now would like for our work to appear in the literature as a product of the bureau only. They have requested not to be listed as an author. Can I honor the request?
• Why is authorship designation important to scientific integrity?
• Are the FAQs here consistent with other sources? What other resources are there describing scientific integrity in authorship?
• Who do I contact if I have questions about scientific integrity related to authorship, or comments about the concepts presented here? What roles and responsibilities do authors have when producing a scientific or scholarly work?                                                                                                    

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Office of the Provost

Guidance on authorship in scholarly or scientific publications, general principles.

The public’s trust in and benefit from academic research and scholarship relies upon all those involved in the scholarly endeavor adhering to the highest ethical standards, including standards related to publication and dissemination of findings and conclusions.

Accordingly, all scholarly or scientific publications involving faculty, staff, students and/or trainees arising from academic activities performed under the auspices of Yale University must include appropriate attribution of authorship and disclosure of relevant affiliations of those involved in the work, as described below.

These publications, which, for the purposes of this guidance, include articles, abstracts, manuscripts submitted for publication, presentations at professional meetings, and applications for funding, must appropriately acknowledge contributions of colleagues involved in the design, conduct or dissemination of the work by neither overly attributing contribution nor ignoring meaningful contributions.

Financial and other supporting relationships of those involved in the scholarly work must be transparent and disclosed in publications arising from the work.

Authorship Standards

Authorship of a scientific or scholarly paper should be limited to those individuals who have contributed in a meaningful and substantive way to its intellectual content. All authors are responsible for fairly evaluating their roles in the project as well as the roles of their co-authors to ensure that authorship is attributed according to these standards in all publications for which they will be listed as an author.

Requirement for Attribution of Authorship

Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for its content. All co-authors should have been directly involved in all three of the following:

• planning and contribution to some component (conception, design, conduct, analysis, or interpretation) of the work which led to the paper or interpreting at least a portion of the results;
• writing a draft of the article or revising it for intellectual content; and
• final approval of the version to be published.  All authors should review and approve the manuscript before it is submitted for publication, at least as it pertains to their roles in the project.

Some diversity exists across academic disciplines regarding acceptable standards for substantive contributions that would lead to attribution of authorship. This guidance is intended to allow for such variation to disciplinary best practices while ensuring authorship is not inappropriately assigned.

Lead Author

The first author is usually the person who has performed the central experiments of the project. Often, this individual is also the person who has prepared the first draft of the manuscript. The lead author is ultimately responsible for ensuring that all other authors meet the requirements for authorship as well as ensuring the integrity of the work itself. The lead author will usually serve as the corresponding author.

Co-Author(s)

Each co-author is responsible for considering his or her role in the project and whether that role merits attribution of authorship. Co-authors should review and approve the manuscript, at least as it pertains to their roles in the project.

External Collaborators, Including Sponsor or Industry Representatives

Individuals who meet the criteria for authorship should be included as authors irrespective of their institutional affiliations. In general, the use of “ghostwriters” is prohibited, i.e., individuals who have contributed significant portions of the text should be named as authors or acknowledged in the final publication. Industry representatives or others retained by industry who contribute to an article and meet the requirements for authorship or acknowledgement must be appropriately listed as contributors or authors on the article and their industry affiliation must be disclosed in the published article.

Acknowledgements

Individuals who do not meet the requirements for authorship but who have provided a valuable contribution to the work should be acknowledged for their contributing role as appropriate to the publication.

Courtesy or Gift Authorship

Individuals do not satisfy the criteria for authorship merely because they have made possible the conduct of the research and/or the preparation of the manuscript. Under no circumstance should individuals be added as co-authors based on the individual’s stature as an attempt to increase the likelihood of publication or credibility of the work. For example, heading a laboratory, research program, section, or department where the research takes place does not, by itself, warrant co-authorship of a scholarly paper. Nor should “gift” co-authorship be conferred on those whose only contributions have been to provide, for example, routine technical services, to refer patients or participants for a study, to provide a valuable reagent, to assist with data collection and assembly, or to review a completed manuscript for suggestions. Although not qualifying as co-authors, individuals who assist the research effort may warrant appropriate acknowledgement in the completed paper.

Senior faculty members should be named as co-authors on work independently generated by their junior colleagues only if they have made substantial intellectual contributions to the experimental design, interpretation of findings and manuscript preparation.

Authorship Disputes

Determinations of authorship roles are often complex, delicate and potentially controversial. To avoid confusion and conflict, discussion of attribution should be initiated early in the development of any collaborative publication. For disputes that cannot be resolved amicably, individuals may seek the guidance of the dean of their school or the cognizant deputy provost in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.

Disclosure of Research Funding and Other Support

In all scientific and scholarly publications and all manuscripts submitted for publication, authors should acknowledge the sources of support for all activities leading to and facilitating preparation of the publication or manuscript, including, but not limited to:

• grant, contract, and gift support;
• salary support if other than institutional funds. Note that salary support that is provided to the University by an external entity does not constitute institutional funds by virtue of being distributed by the University; and
• technical or other support if substantive and meaningful to the completion of the project.

Disclosure of Financial Interests and External Activities

Authors should fully disclose related financial interests and outside activities in publications (including articles, abstracts, manuscripts submitted for publication), presentations at professional meetings, and applications for funding.

In addition, authors should comply with the disclosure requirements of the University’s Committee on Conflict of Interest.

The Perfect Research Co-author: How Do I Find You?

Multi-author papers are on the rise in several academic disciplines. Science done in large teams widens the scope of knowledge sharing. Collaboration and co-authoring with other researchers have several benefits. It makes the research more efficient and productive as every co-author brings his/her expertise to the bench! Moreover, cross-cultural and cross-functional team members are likely to infuse greater creativity and insights. Having more co-authors facilitates the sharing of workload and distribution of specific roles within the team. A diverse research group working on one project helps in increasing the outreach of your findings. In addition, research teams having co-authors with gender and ethnic diversity provide a wealth of diverse perspectives!

Collaborative science comes with a lot of responsibility too! Partnering with co-authors can be challenging from manifold standpoints. Co-authors may have different attitudes about the study design and workflow, have different levels of commitment for different tasks, or may have conflicting writing practices. A research project may derail or fail if not coordinated competently. To get the most out of your partnership, you need a strategic approach!

What to Look for in a Potential Co-author?

To facilitate successful and rewarding partnerships , it is paramount to first have an honest look at your strengths and weaknesses. Knowing where you lack can help you find co-authors who have strengths in those zones.

Complementary skill-sets

Is your potential co-author good in ideating and designing experimental work, whereas you are adept at using statistical tools? Does your prospective collaborator have a rich experience in your subject field helping you troubleshoot problems? Having a co-author with complementary strengths ensures greater gains due to the division of labor and field specialization. It encourages new ways of thinking and different resources.

Work ethics

Is the co-author known to have good work ethics? Does he reply to your emails in a timely manner? Is he/she good at keeping promises? Is your co-author willing to devote the time and energy required for conception, design, analysis of research work? Another quality that you should look for is whether your co-author challenges you to do your best!

Career stage and discipline

Diversify your co-author list with scholars from different career stages and disciplines. Diversity is integral to enhancing overall work quality. Both junior and senior scholars bring their own strengths to the table. Having co-authors from different disciplines facilitates having an ‘outside’ perspective in your field of study. Furthermore, it ensures your work reaches different audiences. Bibliometric analysis reveals that articles published with authors having greater ethnic diversity garner greater citation counts!

Writing skills

Identify an author who has good writing skills. Before negotiating the terms for co-authorship, ask for a sample work/previous publications to determine whether the concerned person is a good fit for your study.

Co-author traits

Although knowledge and experience are essential qualities, it is far more important that your potential co-author enjoys working in your field of research. A co-author must be motivated and must commit both time and effort to meet the conventional project guidelines. Furthermore, the co-author must have a positive reputation in the academic arena. A reputed and renowned co-author who is respected for his/her contribution to science is always a great choice! It helps in strengthening the authenticity and credibility of your work.

How to Find Diverse Co-authors?

• Tap your mentors/supervisors for co-authorship opportunities . • Shoot an email with an idea or two to scholars you met at conferences. Follow-up with them to know If they are interested in collaborating with you. • Reach out to potential co-authors through social networking sites such as ORCiD, LinkedIn, Twitter, and ResearchGate. • Use search engines and databases to gain insights into the most prolific, highly cited authors in your field. • Establishing co-authorship with highly cited and influential scientists is advantageous, especially for early-career researchers.

The Tricky Bits to Make the Collaboration Work

There are challenges at various levels, including the provision of fair credit, acceptance of distinct working styles, and clear communication. Achieving consensus is vital for the success of any research project involving multiple authors. To make your research both fun and rewarding, it is important to inculcate values such as patience, empathy, inquisitiveness, and openness. Inappropriate work ethics or selection of an incompatible research partner may lead to a delay or premature termination of the project. Therefore, to ensure timely and satisfactory completion of the research project, one needs to be cautious while collaborating for research and writing. Let us look at things that you can do differently to make co-authorship work .

Authorship roles

• Have an open and frank discussion about individual goals, interests, roles, responsibilities, and needs.
• Determine authorship goals at the very beginning of the research project.
• Jointly decide authorship criteria and explicitly define the tasks worthy of authorship/contributorship. This ensures that when it is time to publish, differences over authorship are far less likely .
• Set clear goals about every co-author’s job and ensure work is allocated in a practical and unbiased manner.

Appreciate the differences

• Maximize demographic and intellectual diversity to optimize research output.
• Be aware of co-author’s expectations, cultural norms, and ethical values, especially for co-authors from a diverse ethnicity.

Believe in teamwork

• Practice co-creation of ideas and strategies, rather than pushing your own thoughts.

Communication

• Communication is the key! Be open and transparent throughout the collaborative journey to avoid any conflicts or misunderstandings.
• Keep all the co-authors informed about the progress and the snags equally.
• Discuss timelines for the research. Create a realistic plan.
• Keep written records of all the discussions and agreements. Conflicts are easier to settle when you have collaborative agreements on paper.

Give credit where it is due

• Ensure fair and equitable distribution of resources.
• Give fair credit to researchers regardless of gender, rank, ethnicity, career stage, etc.

How was your experience while finding compatible co-authors? Do let us know your thoughts on this in the comments section below!

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5 proven ways to find co-authors to collaborate with

Co-authorship can be an efficient (and fun!) way to work on research publications. However, finding a suitable co-author is not always easy. Here are five proven ways to find co-authors to help you get started with your search for academic collaborators.

1. Finding co-authors in your department or lab

A good co-author shares your research interest, preferably complements your expertise, and is a nice person to work with. Therefore, a good starting point to find a co-author is in your department or laboratory.

The search for a suitable co-author often starts in a researcher’s immediate work environment : Deciding whether someone could be a good match to co-author a publication is easier when you know the person.

If personalities or work ethics don’t match, problems and conflicts among co-authors are almost inevitable.

For instance, you should make agreements on the author order, task divisions, and a timeline before embarking on a joint publication! These strategies prevent future conflicts! And preventing conflicts is particularly important if your co-author is a direct colleague.

2. Finding co-authors at conferences

Furthermore, a conference allows you to interact with researchers before inviting them to become co-authors. Thus, you can test the waters and assess whether you could get along.

3. Finding co-authors through cold-emailing

You will have to send a ‘cold email’ if you don’t know each other and have no common connections who could make an introduction. Cold-emailing means you contact someone via email without any prior contact. 

You should be prepared for a no when you go the cold-emailing route. Or for not receiving an answer at all. At the same time, cold-emailing has been the start of many successful co-authorship collaborations. So it is worth a try!

4. Finding co-authors through common connections

It often takes several years to develop a strong network in academia. Therefore, supervisors and other senior colleagues play an important role in introducing you to the right people.

Thus, ask them for recommendations. And if possible, ask them to introduce you to their connections, as it increases your chance of receiving a response.

5. Finding co-authors via #AcademicTwitter

If you have a question or look for a co-author for a specific project, just drop a tweet and include the #AcademicTwitter hashtag. There is a high chance that other academics respond, retweet your request, or point you in the right direction.

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Welcome Co-Authors

What steps do I have to follow to participate?

Select the most appropriate category for your academic and / or professional profile.

In order for you to enter one of our plans, select at least one project within the category.

Select investment plan that best suits your academic achievement.

Make your investment through stripe or paypal safely with a credit or debit card

You will be contacted by RC for active participation in the culmination of the project according to your knowledge and time

Download the intellectual property agreement, sign, scan and upload it to our platform.

The main author will adjust the paper according to the contributions of each participant

The paper will be sent to the journal selected by RC or by the main author, as appropriate.

If the paper is accepted, we will send you an acceptance letter and we will watch over the process until the publication of the scientific article, always maintaining timely communication with you.

If the paper is rejected, don’t worry! Our team will contact you quickly to give you solutions without additional costs and ensure we meet the maximum time of your plan.

Benefits for the Co-Investigator

• Be co-author of a paper of the selected project.
• Obtain payments for registration of papers and / or for open accesss in journals and conferences.
• Participate in a project and write a scientific paper tailored to your abilities, knowledge and time.
• Obtain a scientific publication in Scopus or Wos.
• Participate with authors from different countries.
• Increase your scientific visibility through citations.
• Meet your work or college goals.
• Obtain benefits to invest in the expansion of your projects or new ones.
• Get benefits for conference presentation expenses.

Restrictions on papers and journals

• The journals where the papers are submitted may not be journals considered predatory by the scientific community.
• The preprints made available to the co-authors must comply with the ethical standards of originality, a similarity index of less than 20%, and must not be postulated or published in other journals parallel to their application in CR.
• The data and techniques used to obtain results must comply with the ethical requirements set by the scientific community, in the case of human or animal studies, a letter of endorsement from the ethics committee of the university or center of affiliation of the authors must be presented.
• RC does not promote the use of journals that accept additional payments to facilitate the process of publication of the papers, for this reason if the main researcher assumes the management of the publication before the journal, he / she will be responsible if he / she agrees to said practices and will assume the consequences that this entails.

Policies and guidelines for Co-Investigators and RC

• We do not sell quotas within scientific articles, for this reason when joining a project the co-researcher will sign an agreement with RC where he agrees to cooperate in the research cycle according to his time and strengths.
• If a journal is discontinued from Scopus or WoS and your paper has not been published you will be relocated to an equivalent journal at no additional cost.
• If for any reason RC needs to make a change of journal, it will be agreed with the co-researchers of the project until their satisfaction.
• RC will organize the researchers and co-researchers of your project and will communicate each of the steps as the research cycle progresses.
• RC will monitor your cooperation in the project to ensure the minimum publication times of the results.
• However, you can select your mode of participation according to your strengths and plan it in a way that does not affect your daily activities.
• If the co-researcher decides to withdraw at some point in the cycle, depending on the progress of the project and in accordance with what was previously established, he or she gives up any right to the results and their publications.

Policies and guidelines for Co-Investigators and CR

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