Authorship
Publications are usually key to a career in science. That's why there are often conflicts about whether a person is included as author and if so at which position. Conventions vary by country and institution and change over time. But which criteria should be applied? The Vancouver Convention attempted to give an answer but is not applied by all.
Vancouver Convention
contents
- Authors: The International Committee of Journal Editors = the Vancouver group
- Summary: authorship requires "substantial contribution" to all of the following 3 parts of publishing
- conception, design, analysis, and interpretation
- drafting/revising of the article
- final approval of the version to be published
discussion
R. D. Ganatra criticises the following points: "These guidelines were established to safeguard the position of the editors of journals and are concerned primarily with the written version of a scientific paper. They do not consider how the research project was conducted and who collected experimental data. They ignore technicians who slog to collect the data reported. The guidelines say nothing about researchers who have contributed to the work but whose names are left out of the paper." [1]
Is the Vancouver Convention too vague? Consider this quote of an arbiter explaining the convention: "To be a co-author, a person’s contribution must be substantial, it must be related to the project and the author must have participated in the whole process with critical reflection." Knut Ruyter, National Committee for Medical Research Ethics (NEM). What is substantial is a common question asked.
cases
- Norway: project manager wants co-authorship; researches don't deem contribution sufficient
- beginning of the story as described by Lab Times in "Authorship denied"
- news item: ethics committees disallow project manager’s co-authorship
- add more
links
- original article on the Vancouver Convention: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Uniform requirements submitted to biomedical journals. JAMA 1993; 269: 2282- 6.
- research ethics entry in Wikipedia
- article on ethics of authorship by Indian Journal of Medical Ethics
- article on authorship conventions on onlineethics.org
- research article on authors/paper trends from BMJ
to do
- what's the latest version of the VC; the source above is from '93; surely, wasn't left unchanged
- more critical discussion, more cases
