- Case
Authorship dispute
…conflict of interest statement, and an appropriate acknowledgement section. When the revised manuscript was submitted, the covering letter stated that to comply with the requested revisions and with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ definition of authorship, the list of authors had been amended, but that this amendment could be renegotiated if the editorial team considered that… - CaseCase Closed
Withdrawing from authorship
A journal published a paper that is now under investigation by the host institution for misconduct. All authors signed that they agreed authorship and took responsibility for the content of the paper. After the investigations started, an author asked to be removed from authorship. Questions for the COPE Forum• What should the journal do in this situation? • Should… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship conflict
The Forum advised referring the matter to the institution. Journal editors and publishers cannot be involved in adjudicating authorship disputes. Only the institution(s) can determine who is the rightful author. Hence the advice was to contact the institution and request an investigation. If the institution agrees to investigate, the editor may wish to issue an Expression of Concern until the… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship dispute
…requests or comments regarding their authorship. In May 2015, 7 months after the case report was published, our journal received an email from a legal advocate acting on behalf of the excluded co-authors C, D and E, complaining about the attested authorship of the case report. Co-authors C, D and E claim that author A is not, in fact, the first author and assert that the correct authorship and… - Case
Authorship dispute
An article was published with three authors’ names. Not all of the authors’ signatures had been included on the original submission letter. A complaint was lodged by Y, who said that X had submitted the paper without either his or Z’s consent or knowledge, and that there were several specific errors and omissions. Y then submitted a statement for publication in the journal dissociating himself… - Case
Authorship dispute
…which time he was excluded from authorship. Professor Z did know this action had been taken, apparently by Professor Y, but did not question it. The final resolution involved compromise on both sides, and neither party was happy with my final decision. The resolution involved a corrigendum stating: “This corrigendum is to note that Dr X should have been acknowledged as an author on the… - Case
Authorship dispute
…existing authors were invited to resubmit, but asked to resolve the authorship issue before resubmission. The paper has now been revised and resubmitted, but is currently "stalled". The authors say that the individual making the complaint does not deserve to be an author. The complainant has still not seen the paper, but continues to feel strongly that (s)he should be an author. The institution at… - Case
Misunderstood requirements for authorship
…to explain and account for all the co-authors’ accreditations. From his reply it was clear that he did not understand the requirements for authorship as the associate editor was listed as having been the inspiration for several of his papers. A decision was taken to contact the head of department who also appeared on the paper as the final co-author, asking him to clarify the accreditations… - Case
Stolen data and omission from the authorship list
_ Under the Vancouver guidelines, simply providing cases does not constitute authorship. _ The onus was on the journal to pursue this because the paper had now been published. _ The editor should contact the head of department, but if the institution is unwilling to look at it, then it should be left as an unresolved case. _ First of all, request an explanation from the authors.… - Case
Institutionalised policy of gift authorship?
A manuscript was submitted to our journal. After review we asked for revision. At this time we sent a formatting checklist which includes criteria for authorship. Two authors were removed in the resubmission. Eventually the manuscript was published. At this time one of the formerly included authors contacted us, asking why they were no longer cited. We asked the submitting author, who… - Case
Questions of authorship, duplicate publication and copyright
…guarantor) had ever heard of this chapter or the book. They had not consented to the publication or the authorship of the chapter. The remaining six original authors were acknowledged for their help with the study, but were not listed as authors of the chapter. The chapter acknowledged that the data it contained had been published before. Enquiries to the publisher of the textbook revealed that the sixth… - Case
Authorship dispute
Two manuscripts were received by Journal X, from author A. Both were accepted and sent to the publisher. On receipt of the galley proofs, the corresponding author removed the name of the last author from both manuscripts. Shortly before the page proofs arrived, the journal editors received a request that author A be allowed to remove author B from the authors’ list and instead make a suitable a… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship issues from disbanded consortium
…corresponding author. When queried, the authors agreed that they qualified for authorship (as per the ICMJE criteria). One of them informed the publisher that three junior members of his research group also qualified for authorship but had never been included in the author list. When contacted, these junior three researchers requested to be included as authors. The manuscript's publication was put on… - Case
Redundant publication and a question of authorship
A paper was reviewed and subsequently published in December 1999. A further publication with an almost identical title, but with different authors, was published in another journal in 2000. It is quite clear both papers relate to the same study, and apart from some minor differences in style, which were probably requested by the editorial offices, they seem to be identical. The editor of the se… - CaseOn-going
Authorship dispute regarding author order
A paper was accepted in 2012 but there was a lengthy disagreement between the four authors regarding the order of authorship. The authors were advised that the paper would not be published unless all authors could sign a written agreement on the order of authorship and copyright form. An agreement was received in 2015 that specified the order of authorship and named one of the authors… - Case
Authorship without the author’s knowledge
A paper was rejected on the reviewer’s recommendation. The editor met one of the senior authors at a conference and out of politeness apologised for rejecting his paper. He was surprised to learn that the senior author had no knowledge of this paper and that the corresponding author had written papers using the senior author’s name without his knowledge in the past. This prompted the editor to… - Case
What constitutes authorship?
…make a substantial scientific contribution to the article and that the notice in the acknowledgments was appropriate. Authors X and Y hold similar views as to what author Y's contribution was, but different views on whether this is sufficient for authorship. The editor notified authors X, Y and the administrative head of the institute, and recommended that the parties resolve the matter among… - Case
Disputed authorship
Last year, a paper was published with four named authors. The journal concerned then received a letter from another person claiming that they should also have been credited with authorship. That person (Dr M) had been the second author on an abstract with a similar title presented at a conference, on which the authors of the published paper were also named authors. The journal wrote to the… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship dispute unsatisfactorily resolved by institution
The journal was contacted with a claim to first authorship of a paper currently published online ahead of print. Print publication was put on hold pending the result of the investigation. The claim to first authorship was based on the claimant stating that they had obtained most results published in the paper during their PhD studies under the supervision of the corresponding author, and… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship of a commentary
The Forum agreed that it is not necessarily unethical for an associate editor to author a commentary, but in this situation, the associate editor and the original author of the commentary need to explain how the associate editor came to be a co-author. There is a potential issue of coercion, where the associate editor may have persuaded the co-authors to assign them authorship. The second…