The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.
ICMJE | Recommendations | Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors
Simply supervising/editing etc. is not sufficient to qualify as an author.
Indeed. The 4 criteria are needed to define an author; not just one of them
Most authors may not be aware about these 4 essential criteria for the authorship
Hello, I may say that the definition of "author" varies on the basis of the macro-field (e.g., hard sciences against soft sciences) and the journal. I work in humanities and we don't have such a specific (I may say restrictive?) definition of authorship, or at least not that I am aware of.
AuthormetriX: Automated Calculation of Individual Authors’ Non-Inflationary Credit-Allocation Schemas’ and Collaboration Metrics from a Scopus Corpus
"Publication count is the currency in academia, but the most widely used whole count method is considered unfair and inflationary. Several non-inflationary author credit-allocation schemas (NIACAS) have been proposed, but none is widely adopted in practice (e.g., in evaluating faculty scholarly productivity) or in bibliometric research. This low adoption and implementation rate may be due to the complexity in operationalizing the schemas.
Aim: To develop an application that automates the calculation of individual authors’ scholarly output metrics based on multiple NIACAS...
AuthormetriX simplifies the implementation of non-inflationary author credit-allocation schemas and will facilitate their broader adoption in practice and bibliometric research."
AuthormetriX is freely available at:
https://sadeosun-a-uthormetrix-v1.streamlit.app/
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.19.633820v2
Should authorship on scientific publications be treated as a right?
"Sometimes researchers explicitly or implicitly conceive of authorship in terms of moral or ethical rights to authorship when they are dealing with authorship issues. Because treating authorship as a right can encourage unethical behaviours, such as honorary and ghost authorship, buying and selling authorship, and unfair treatment of researchers, we recommend that researchers not conceive of authorship in this way but view it as a description about contributions to research. However, we acknowledge that the arguments we have given for this position are largely speculative and that more empirical research is needed to better ascertain the benefits and risks of treating authorship on scientific publications as a right."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369049873_Should_authorship_on_scientific_publications_be_treated_as_a_right
How the Chennai-based ARDA guarantees quick publication without peer-reviewing, sells authorship
“Your full paper, we can publish by August 15. If you complete the payment [of Rs.23,000] today [August 6, 2025], formatting will be completed tomorrow and sent for publication,” the Chennai-based Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA) person messaged on WhatsApp. Phew!
"The Chennai-based Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), which published around 84 “journals” as of March last year, can be called a paper mill or a predatory publisher but with a small difference — many of its journals are indexed on Scopus or Web of Science.
A paper published on August 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has detailed about the alarming growth of scientific fraud and made a special mention about the Chennai-based ARDA for the far higher rate of journals being deindexed by Scopus. In 2020, 33% (13 of 39) of ARDA journals were deindexed by Scopus, while the baseline rate was 0.5%. Of the 86 journals in March 2024, Reese A.K. Richardson a Postdoc from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois and the first author of the PNAS paper and others found that 17 journals were suspected to be “hijacked journals” — once legitimate journals that had been taken over by a paper mill, which has gained complete editorial control over the journal and its indexed content. The researchers also found that 34% to 98.7% of the papers published in ARDA journals were typically “outside of the journal’s stated scope”...
Despite thousands of predatory journal and paper mills spread across many countries, was Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA) picked up for special mention in the PNAS paper because Reese Richardson had already investigated it and written an article in Retraction Watch or was ARDA, even by the standards of a predatory journal/paper mill, way above the ordinary? "
https://sciencechronicle.in/2025/08/07/how-the-chennai-based-arda-guarantees-quick-publication-without-peer-reviewing-sells-authorship/
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Agriculture
- Soil Science
- Soil