Page 40 - Becoming Metric Wise

29
Scientific Research and Communication

http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/
defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html. An “author” is
generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual
contributions to a published study. An author must take responsibility for at
least one component of the work, should be able to identify who is respon-
sible for each of the other components, and should be confident in their
coauthors’ ability and integrity. In the past, editors and readers were rarely
provided with information about the exact contribution of persons listed as
authors or mentioned in the acknowledgments section. Nowadays, however,
most journals publish information about the contributions of each person
namedashavingparticipatedinasubmittedstudy.Moreover, they may ask
for the name of a contributor who will act as a guarantor, this means the
person who takes responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole.
Another problem is the question of the quantity and/or quality of
contribution that qualifies for authorship. The International Committee
of Medical Journal Editors or ICMJE (http://www.icmje.org/recommen-
dations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-
contributors.html) recommends the following four points as criteria for
authorship:
1. substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data,
or analysis and interpretation of data.
2. drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual
content.
3. final approval of the version to be published.
4. 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.
Authors should meet each of these four conditions. Acquisition of
funding, pure data collection (but see below for a remark on biological
field work), or general supervision of the research group alone does not
constitute authorship.
All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all
those who qualify should be listed. Authorship of big science investiga-
tions such as multicenter trials (in medicine); particle physics studies (as
e.g., performed in CERN) or use of space ships or telescopes is often
attributed to a group, using a group name such as e.g., the ATLAS collab-
oration (Aad et al., 2015). Also in cases of mega- (Kretschmer &
Rousseau, 2001; Sen, 1997) or hyper-authorship (Cronin, 2001) all
members of the group who are named as authors should, in principle,