Ethical Issues in Scientific Publishing 10-15
Appendix 1: Insights on Determining Authorship James Cox, MD Professor, Division of Radiation Oncology Former Editor in Chief, International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics
Authorship guidelines vary widely from country to country and from one institution to another. In the United States, it is generally accepted that the first author should be the individual who contributes most to the work and who is the primary author of the manuscript. Usually the last author is the individual who has provided the scientific and administrative framework for the development of the study and oversight of the findings. This individual is usually most responsible for an understanding of the integration of the reported findings with the literature and with emerging findings from other institutions. It is easiest to decide who will be the last or senior author when it is a laboratory where numerous postdoctoral trainees, graduate students, and junior faculty work. This is not so consistently the case in the clinical arena. A variation on the author list above is the report by a trainee (resident or fellow) with the direct supervision and mentoring of a faculty member. In this case, the faculty member is often listed as the second author unless he or she is at the same time the senior author, in which case he or she may be the last author. All authors should have contributed in a clearly identifiable way in generating the data, contributing to the analysis, and/or reviewing and critiquing the manuscript. The first or senior author is most responsible for identifying the contributing authors. In the current environment where collaborative work is encouraged, it is wise to be inclusive of authors rather than exclusive lest the work of a contributing individual fail to be recognized. On the other hand, honorary authorship is not warranted; that is, listing the name of someone who has neither directly participated in the work nor contributed to the writing and reviewing of the manuscript should not be done. Disagreements about authorship usually occur when there has been no discussion of authorship prior to the generation of a completed manuscript. If there is a disagreement about authorship, the two people most responsible for deciding the author list are the first author and the senior author. Cooperative group guidelines serve as a good example of the variability of publication guidelines. In the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), the first author is the principal investigator (PI) of the trial, the second author is the statistician who has been most responsible for analyzing the results, and the other authors are the major participants who have supported the trial both intellectually and by enrolling their patients. The study chair is not on the author list in most cases unless he or she is actually the PI of the trial. By contrast, in the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project, Dr. Bernard Fisher was the PI of every trial and was the first author on the overwhelming majority of publications stemming from the work of this group over a 30+ year period. Somewhere in between are the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group and the Southwest Oncology Group, who give special recognition to the disease site chair (lung, gynecologic, genitourinary, etc.) as well as the modality chairs (surgery, radiation oncology, medical oncology, etc). These groups do not recognize the contributions of investigators from individual institutions but rather put all of their emphasis on the “scientific leadership” under whom the studies were developed.
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