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Authorship standards
Authorship standards
To earn authorship on a scholarly publication, a person should have contributed directly to the work in a meaningful and substantive way.
All collaborators in a project should evaluate their own and each other's roles and contributions to determine if and where they should be included in the list of authors. This assessment should take into account each contributor's role.
Authorship requires direct contribution to each of the following aspects:
planning and executing some aspect of the study (conception, design, execution, analysis, interpretation) that led to the manuscript
writing of the draft or substantive editing and revising of the scholarly content
reading and approval of the finalized manuscript, at least of the aspects relevant to their roles and contributions
Please use the most current guidelines for inclusive attribution of authorship, such as guidelines developed by the British Ecological Society.
talking authorship with your collaborators
talking authorship with your collaborators
Agree on expectations for co-authorship as early as possible; include all potential contributors in this conversation.
Create a written document of agreed-upon expectations (such as by sharing meeting minutes).
Any adjustments, such as additional tasks arising during the project, should lead to a re-evaluation of prior agreements.
Avoid adding or omitting co-authors after the initial submission. Adding an author will trigger an investigation. ICB follows the guidelines intended to prevent gift authorships and submissions from paper mills.
Please alert the journal if the revisions requested by the journal after peer review require adding an author. Provide a detailed explanation in the cover letter of your resubmitted paper.
Resources
Resources
Example guidance documents
Example guidance documents
Authorship (Committee on Publication Ethics COPE)
Contributor Roles Taxonomy CRediT - a tool to determine contributor roles for traditional academic collaborators; please use the expanded tool below for a more inclusive approach to attributing co-authorship
How CRediT helps shift from authorship to contributorship (journal article)
Contemporary authorship guidelines fail to recognize diverse contributions in conservation science research (journal article, 2021)
How to Handle Co-authorship When Not Everyone’s Research Contributions Make It into the Paper (journal article, 2021)
Ten strategies for avoiding and overcoming authorship conflicts in academic publishing (journal article, 2021)
Guidance on Authorship in Scholarly or Scientific Publications (Yale University resource)
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