Authorship Principles

Post date: Oct 16, 2008 4:16:50 PM

Please note that the GBD-2010 Injury expert group no longer exists.

- Please visit the website www.globalburdenofinjuries.org to find out more about other closely related collaborations of our group members.

- If you are interested in the ongoing work of IHME's GBD project, please visit their official website http://www.healthdata.org/gbd.

We anticipate that the collaborative work of the GBD Injury expert group will result in a series of academic research publications.

The authorship of all group publications should reflect the usual accepted notions in the academic community. A good starting point for this are the recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), described online at http://www.icmje.org/

Here are some relevant sections:

  1. "Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.
  2. When a large, multi-center group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship/contributorship defined above and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict of interest disclosure forms. When submitting a group author manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and should clearly identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals will generally list other members of the group in the acknowledgments. The National Library of Medicine indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript."
  3. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.
  4. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
  5. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content."

Operationalizing these principles for our expert group:

Whenever a discussion topic (or a subset of a discussion topic) become ready for publication:

  1. We should use the ICMJE principle #1 listed above to identify named authors for publication. Contributors who do not meet the above criteria should be listed in acknowledgements.
  2. All group publications should include "on behalf of the Global Burden of Disease Injury Expert Group" in the authorship list, or use the closest equivalent acceptable to the journal for large multi-center group publications. In addition, the acknowledgements section should include the following sentence, "This study was conducted as part of the collaborative activities of the Global Burden of Disease Injury Expert Group (http://sites.google.com/site/gbdinjuryexpertgroup/)"
  3. The responsibility of ensuring that these authorship guidelines (and arbitration of any conflicts related to authorship) falls on the lead author of the discussion topic from which the publication was produced.

A good example of the application of these authorship principles is this paper published by the expert group.