Citation Analysis: Submitting Your Manuscript

Author Rights

The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) webpage offers valuable information on understanding and retaining author rights, an introduction to copyright resources, and alternative publishing options. 

• Can I post my articles on my course Web sites or in institutional repositories?
• Can I share my work freely after assigning exclusive copyright to a publisher?
• Is it okay for me to post my work in NIH’s PubMed Central?

Read Author Rights 

Author Addendum

Generate a printable addendum to your publishing agreement in one easy step. Each addendum gives you non-exclusive rights to create derivative works from your article and to reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display your article in connection with your teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and professional activities. However, they differ with respect to how soon you can make the final published version available and whether you can authorize others to re-use your work in various ways.

Author Addendum Generator

The following guidelines are available to help determine what constitutes authorship or contributorship when there are multiple authors for a manuscript. 

What constitutes authorship?

According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), authors must satisfy all three of the following conditions:

• “Substantially contribute” to the conception and design of the study, the acquisition of the data, or the analysis/interpretation of data;
• Participate in drafting the article or revising it critically for intellectual content; and
• Review and approve the final, submitted version.

As part of the manuscript review process and to discourage abusive authorship practices, all authors may be asked to formally attest, in writing, to their contributions to the paper. 

Ethical Responsibilities of Authors

"Authors are responsible for ensuring that their study methods and findings are honestly reported and that the study was carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical standards. In particular, outright misconduct, such as falsification of data, fabrication of data, and plagiarism, is considered especially reprehensible and can irreparably damage an author’s career."

Determining Authorship and Order of Listing

Before writing begins, those involved in a study should determine who will be the lead or first author and what is expected of that individual (the lead author is not always the principal investigator).

The lead author is then responsible for

• developing the initial draft of the manuscript, and has final say regarding the wording and content of the paper
• assuring that the coauthors satisfy their responsibilities as authors and can determine whose name will be dropped from the listing if they do not fulfill their assigned responsibilities
• determining the order in which the remaining authors will be listed (or may be determined by consensus)

"The order of authorship should ideally reflect the relative level of intellectual contribution of the coauthors. For collaborative papers reporting on large studies and involving numerous coauthors, it may not be possible to accurately construct such an ordering. In such cases, coauthors are sometimes listed in alphabetical order either after the first author or after the first few authors. This fact may be indicated on the title page of the submitted manuscript and is sometimes noted by the journal. Another exception to a strict ordering by level of contribution is the use of the so-called “senior author” position, in which the senior member of a research team may choose to be listed last."

Challenges and Problem Practices

There are several categories of dubious or unethical authorship practices:

• Coercion authorship - when a person in a position of authority uses that position to compel another author to include him/her on a manuscript even though that person does not meet the accepted authorship criteria
• Mutual support/admiration authorship  - occurs when two authors wishing to pad their bibliographies agree to place each others’ names on their respective papers even though each may have made little or no contribution to the other’s paper
• Gift authorship  - occurs when an individual is listed as an author either solely as a gesture of respect (eg, for a mentor) or as an attempt to make a paper appear more credible than it is. Gift authors may be unaware that they have been named on the paper.
• Ghostwriter - An author may be hired to write all or part of a manuscript but is not listed as an author or acknowledged in the manuscript. 
• Duplicate production authorship - publishing essentially the same article in multiple journals, as book chapters, and so on. When done in an abusive manner, the sole purpose may be to pad one’s bibliography. 

Content on this page is directly summarized or adapted from the article

Vollmer W.M. (2007). Responsibilities of authorship. Chest, 132(6), 2042-5.

Other resources: