A group of experts from two different learned societies produced a consensus of guidelines on the management of a condition. Both societies wished to publish the manuscript in the respective journals of their societies. However, they requested the authorship order be different on the two respective submissions.
Questions for COPE Council
- Is it feasible to publish one article with two sets of author orders simultaneously in two different journals?
- Are there any potential issues with referencing?
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance.
Consensus publications should be identical in all of the journals they appear in, in order to present a consistent front. Changing the author ordering between journals could lead to potential confusion by readers and practitioners (i.e., do the two papers present the same set of guidelines, or a variation?). It could also cause complications and issues for publishers, citation scores and those wishing to cite the article. It might also lead to supposed 'corrections' to the author list during copy editing or typesetting subsequent articles that cite one of the articles.
The order should be agreed on beforehand and kept the same in both articles, with a clear notice of the agreed simultaneous publication. If there is a clear leader of each society, those two names could go first, and a footnote added of equal contribution. If the societies coauthor again, they could take it in turns for the actual first position, even if the leaders have changed.
An alternative solution might be to consider the authorship being a collective group (e.g., The Protocol Guidelines Consortium or similar) with the individuals being listed separately in variant order across different journals.
Joint publication implies an identical paper in all of the journals. If that is not acceptable, one journal could offer to take the lead and publish the full document, and the others producing an executive summary.