AIM To present the inappropriate types of authorship and practice, and the most recent developments related to basic principles and criteria to a fair system for allocating authorship in scientific publications. METHODS An analysis of relevant materials and documents, sources from the internet and published literature and personal experience and observations of the author. RESULTS Working i...

CONTEXT A number of general medical journals and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) request authors to disclose their contributions. Little is known about the effect of journal policies on authors' disclosure of their contributions. OBJECTIVE To determine the number of named authors who do not meet ICMJE criteria for authorship, according to their published contrib...

I n November 2003, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) published a revised version of their Uniform Requirements for manuscripts, first launched in 1979 by a small group of editors of general medical journals then simply named the Vancouver Group. This committee has produced six editions of the Uniform Requirements, the last one reviewing the whole document and includ...

I recently gave a lecture to the faculty and house officers in my department on the topic of submitting a manuscript for publication. I covered how to choose a journal, the importance of following the instructions for authors, responsibilities of authorship, communications with the editor, misuse of figures and tables, linking cited references to Medline and PubMed, what happens at the journal ...

OBJECTIVES To assess the prevalence of honorary and ghost authors in six leading general medical journals in 2008 and compare this with the prevalence reported by authors of articles published in 1996. DESIGN Cross sectional survey using a web based questionnaire. SETTING International survey of journal authors. PARTICIPANTS Sample of corresponding authors of 896 research articles, review...

BACKGROUND Multi-collaborator research is increasingly becoming the norm in the field of biomedicine. With this trend comes the imperative to award recognition to all those who contribute to a study; however, there is a gap in the current "gold standard" in authorship guidelines with regards to the efforts of those who provide high quality biosamples and data, yet do not play a role in the inte...

which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Currently science editing is a discipline which covers various issues in science writing, ethical editing, peer review, publishing and scientomet-rics. Authorship in scholarly journals, and its abuses, is one of the key topics in this discipline and shapes i...

The authors are on the editorial team of Open Medicine. G host authorship occurs when someone makes a significant contribution to a manuscript without due acknowledgement of their role. Guest authorship , in contrast, occurs when an individual is named as an author of a manuscript when they do not meet authorship criteria. Both are disturbingly common. 1 The preliminary results of a recent surv...