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The Thrill and Responsibilities of Authorship

For me, and so many other researchers, there is tremendous excitement, satisfaction, and even thrill in seeing a paper accepted or in print. There is even greater joy with our first paper published or with the paper that the reviewers disliked so much but which we felt passionately had merit and we doggedly persevered. There are cases in which research that went on to transform a field was initially rejected. There may be relief seeing our paper published as it might be the crucial study on which a series of papers can now be submitted. Another time when publication is met by relief is when the number of papers published is counted for promotion, merit pay, or to prevent being terminated from a position. It is easy to understand the temptation to "fudge" or falsify data.

The rest of this editorial addresses the responsibilities of authorship. Simply put, authorship requires each author to be intimately involved in the research and to have made a substantive intellectual contribution to all phases of the work—from inception to design, to carrying out the study, to analysis, to writing the manuscript.

All authors are responsible for all aspects of the manuscript as submitted, for the changes made in a revision, and for the entire final published paper. The corresponding author is responsible for communication about the paper but does not have a special responsibility for the content of the paper. All authors must review the manuscript at the various stages to ensure that they meet their responsibilities. When this does not happen and there is a problem, the potential exists for tremendous embarrassment to each of the authors. Retraction of a paper can damage a scientist’s reputation and have serious career consequences.

Let us consider some of the responsibilities of all the authors. The manuscript needs to address the following questions:

• What is the uniqueness of the piece of work (should be clearly explained in both the introduction and abstract)?
  
• What is/are the hypothesis(es) being tested?
  
• Is the experimental design adequate or exceptional? Why were the specific line, ages, diet, photoperiod, and so on, used in the study? The methods section should contain sufficient detail to allow the study to be repeated and should include the number of replicates.
  
• Has an animal protocol undergone Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) or equivalent approval? Were the animals treated humanely?
  
• Were appropriate methods (including chemical and statistical methods) used?
  
• Was the literature reviewed in an objective manner irrespective of who did the past work and when it was done? We often forget that good work was done 10, 20, or even 30 years ago.
  

All the authors need to be confident of the veracity of the data; this helps ensure repeatability. Fabrication is always wrong, whether it is embellishment or cleaning up images, (e.g., of a gel), selection of data, or excluding studies that do not fit our preconceptions. It is important to present results such that the reader sees results that are statistically and biologically significant.

There should never be courtesy authorship. It is inappropriate for anyone, including a department head or director, to ask for or be offered authorship unless they meet all the requirements of authorship as outlined above. It is equally problematic to offer or ask for authorship in exchange for funding, reagents, or administrative support, or to offer authorship to a student in lieu of paying them. There should never be a quid pro quo from a likely reviewer for tenure or promotion (a conflict of interest then exists), for financial benefit, for friendship, or for sexual favors.

Although publishing is a joy and a terrific boost to our confidence, career, and reputation, the responsibilities are profound.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				C. G. Scanes Duplicate publication--An unacceptable practice Poult. Sci., March 1, 2009; 88(3): 455 - 455. [Full Text] [PDF]

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Scanes, C. G. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Scanes, C. G.