Real author is who plan, organize and write the scientific article.

Real author is who plan, organize and write the scientific article.

Thanks dear Dr. Subhash C. Kundu for your definition of real author. Do you think that it is important to legitimate some roles to prevent adding the name of someone as a co-author without doing any expertise items?

what about Alpher, Bethe and Gamow?

I agree with Dr.Subhash C. Kundu. But I can not understand the question of Dr. J.C. Tiago de Oliveira.

May you explain more about your question Dr. J.C. Tiago de Oliveira please?

We cannot know who is a real author, unless we know the authors and their style, perhaps, or if the team describe their individual roles - and that is normally not something that a journal wants to spend precious space on. You just have to guess - or you might know the authors and their style. In any case, it appears to me that a practice where non-authors in reality are still listed as authors clearly is unethical.

One more thing: it appears to me that plenty of posts are based on a kind of anxiety - as if it were more important to talk about the ordering of authors than about the actual contribution of the paper. Skip the worry, and work harder instead. :-)

Regarding the choice of ordering of the authors, I have this compromise: let the ordering always be alphabetical, and let the main, or corresponding, author be the star-marked author, whichever you prefer. Then everyone will know who is the "boss", and we can relax about the ordering, which anyway cannot be completely understood, if the number of authors is higher than two. Then we can focus on more interesting matters, such as whether the paper is of interest at all ...

Dear Dr. Seyed Mehdi Mohammadizadeh ,

It is an elegant bag contains an idea, work, and output. Its elegant is the result of collaborative work among a group of researchers. Each of whom participates in these fields is a co-author of the research.

Best regards.

Dear Prof. Michael Patriksson,

Thanks a lot for your attention, time and sharing your beneficial idea about real-author.

Thanks dear Dr. J.C. Tiago de Oliveira, Dr. Ali Mohammadrezazadeh and Dr. Abdulfatah Abdu Yusuf for your cotributions.

Dear Dr. J.C. Tiago de Oliveira, it will be appreciated if you clarify and explain more about your question.

Dear Dr. Shaden M H Mubarak,

Your prolific respond is highly appreciated.

Generally, the first author.

et al. s are just assistants, as per my idea.

Good question. Following.

Thanks dear Dr. Shibabrata Pattanayak for sharing your idea.

This question does not arise among people who write a specific article. Most of them exactly know without whom this article would not appears.

I think the main author is 1st author. However, since in most of the cases a group performs an experiment or conduct research so everyone who worked are co-authors.

Author is author

The words "real" and "not real" are irrelevant, especially in a research article.

Thanks dear Dr. Rama I. Ali, Dr. Vadim S. Gorshkov and Dr. Syed Asad Ali Zaidi for your contributions.

Real author is who plan,analysis, and find results

Dear Dr. Nafees Mohammad,

Your respond is highly appreciated. May I ask your opinion about bottom items, please?

• Translator is not coauthor, as well as corrector etc.
• Famous people of each are added as coauthor. Is it ethical?

That is the reason why I only count the first author. The others are just assistants. By the way, several countries (including Korea) count a corresponding author as the first author. Such a practice ignites unethical conflicts between scholars. For example, a professor all but takes the corresponding author even if he or she does virtually nothing to contribute to his/her students; students are upset with it but cannot complain about it in order to graduate.

Thanks dear Dr. Ali Hamzah Obaid for sharing your useful idea.

The real author is the one who proposes the title, diagnoses and analyzes the real author's book

Dear Dr. Claire Su-Yeon Park and Dr. Zainab A Makawi,

Thanks a lot for your comprehensive answers.

@Nafees Mohammad

Word “real” is quite relevant for the person who plays a leading (or active) role in writing the article. “Not real” relates to those who are co-authored for administrative and other reasons. I know several possible options. But these all come down to decision of the chief, who even did not read the work itself. Earlier, I thought that this was possible only in FSU, but lately I realized that it was not only. Even in the USA (in a democratic and lawful society, as many believe) such incidents are visible. However, sometimes the author himself, without pressure from outside, includes some people in co-authors list ("by friendship", "by love", as an advance to hyperactive "beginner", his own graduate student, because "he needs to report", etc.). Everyone is “smith” of his own trouble…

The author is the one who performs the analysis, design, implementation and testing of the subject matter of the article.

The real/main author is the one who have contributed mainly in conceptualizing the research article and is usually the first author. Corresponding author may be equal to the first author or may be different. However in most of the cases the corresponding author is the principal investigator or supervisor.

I believe that the main author is the one who supervises all stages of a specific research, and as a coordinator , evaluates and edits the work prior to its submission.

Any idea is easy to bring to the point of absurdity. I know one Acad.Sci. Institute, where coauthors before publishing an article should sign a paper that assesses everyone's personal contribution to the article. For the main author, the fact of publication of the article is most important. And according to my personal observations, his name usually stands in the middle of the list of coauthors.

Who works hard and make the idea executable and applicable.

In this discussion, it will appreciated if RG colleagues try to investigate and compare the idea of Dr. Vadim S. Gorshkov and Dr. Nafees Mohammad about the real author.

Thanks dear Dr. Vadim S. Gorshkov, Dr. Sandhyarani Khomdram and Dr.

hansaa Azeez Obayes Al-Husseini for your beneficial respond.

Dear Dr. Leonid V Vladimirov, Dr. Reza Biria and Dr. Ashwan Abdulmunem,

Your comprehensive answers are highly appreciated.

Seyed Mehdi Mohammadizadeh: Can we drop all the thanks, please - the actual thread of answers is now less than the "thank you":s, and we really don't need them.

Prof. Michael Patriksson,

Definitely yes. If you think it is not necessary, I won't do it again.

Really,it's good question

There are usually many authors who have acting as researchers from study plan, data collection, data analysis, and manuscript writing

So I guess the planner may be considered as initiator and most important, may be real as you term it but credit should go to the team

I think it is unethical for both: the one who puts rhe name of other person to get some benefits and for those who allow that.

Is only a post either planning and writing is due to the real author either co-be famous for just no more ....

Greetings

Thanks, Seyed. :-)

By the way, I have on occasion had very good help from master students, typically through their implementation of algorithms - some of them have lead to very nice journal papers.

"In your acknowledgements section, give a list of the real (or virtual) names of the consortium members who helped you. They are not co-authors."

By: Dr. Ian Kennedy

The real author [usually one, rarely two, exceptionally - where there is very clearly stated: paragraph 1: XY, paragraph 2: NN, paragraph 3: AB - perhaps three] is the person who has formulated and written the text: all the other "coauthors", irrespective of how much they cooperated in the project (co-operation does not mean co-authorship!) are in fact "pseudo-authors", the proper place for their names is among the Acknowledgements, notices like "XY pers. comm.", or References!

All authors must disclose any personal relationship with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence their work. Examples of potential competing interests include employment, consultancies, honoraria, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding.

The first author is the real -author !!!!!

The last is the person who is the supervisor (I won't say beyond this :))

In-between people are limited participants (trust me this is sometimes a sham )

To avoid adding by editing etc etc then use services (Editorial)

Aparna: that is NOT necessarily the case: in a true collaboration the ordering of authors is sometimes alphabetical, simply because the authors want the paper to appear exactly as it was constructed - in a true collective, where no author is more important than the other. There is a too strong emphasis on the ordering of authors; some say that we need to order authors in a seniority order, while another insists on having the last author being the one who got the grant money, and so on and so forth. I have advocated for a long time that the alphabetical ordering is the best, simply because it is the one that is most similar to a "non-ordering" - with the principle that the paper is the main object of interest, not necessarily the authors.

Real author who has the idea of the article and then make plan and organize it and it is not necessary to write it because can any othe researcher help him/her to write it .

European-American system normally assume on last position the biggest person from the list - professor, chef of the group or if there is collaboration of few groups - the one with highest position - like institute director. Also this person normally is corresponding author (Alternatively the first author).

If it is paper of one group one can expect that on first place stays the person who wrote the paper - PhD student or postdoc/groupleader. Alternatively "subleading" postdoc can be second, depending on his role, or even be pushed further if first 2 PhDs have "equal contribution". Somewhere between 3rd and prelast position it is rear to see person who organise the project or wrote the paper.

In case of big projects it can easily be over 10-20 coauthors. More about "hyperauthorship" can be found in https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2015/11/25/science-and-the-rise-of-the-co-authors/ , in particular Nature paper from CERN with 5000+ authors

In SovietUnion science-articles (also post-USSR, by people who used to it) order quite strongly correlated with impact of author or at least his importance. Whenever it does not help to identify "real" author - quite often LAST position is occupied by student who did the least.

Dear colleagues

I support Dmitry. If it is a postgraduate article: you want to know the author - this is the first behind. Of course, this is a joke, but here, unfortunately, there is a share of the truth ...

Dmitry: this is why we misunderstand each other so often in these threads: in math (at least in all the departments that I have been attached to - four of them - we don't put any hot-shot at the end, EVER - only the ones who really worked on the paper are listed as authors, and that is how it should be. Anything else is a scam.

Michael Patriksson , as much i saw math papers - they are either monoauthor or very few people. It has some logic on my opinion. Its kind of "one brain work". In chemistry and material science its pretty different. Lets say there is group of "real chemists" that synthesised compound - lets say quite small -

1) Chef who defined the goal, he have grant from which he pays to students, he need publications to keep and improve his status to get money again, he corrects the manuscript and take care of submission.

2) Postdoc who made some preliminary work on project, he defines approaches to be used and solves problems of PhD-student. He also take care on accumulation of data (below).

3) PhD-student who actually "did the job". He was writing initial draft that in 10 circulations between him and postdoc finally turns into a manuscript (that has little to do with initial draft).

Kind of all? Almost!

We assume that NMR and MS you made almost yourself or people on this devices get money instead of publication.

X-ray is tricky question. There are cases when X-ray people has to work hard that you get what you want from what you provided them. While in ordinar case you might stay without them.

However "synthesis and prove of structure" rarely jump to Q1 journals.

4-8) Computationalist. Bioactivitytesting. Synchrotron (Oh sh.. that will cost you more than one guy). These people do not belong to the group and not service of your institute. They spent their time and resources (price of beamtime hour? price of 1 million cpu-hours?) not to be burried in Acknowledgments. You have chances to find computationalist who will not bring his boss in coauthors (and just thanks to supercluster/foundation), but no way for Bio and Beam. Yes, they are not "real" authors, but they write their subsections and significantly improves quality of your paper.

So kind of 6-7 people and thats pretty minimal plan. One PhD synthesised linkers and another turned them into frameworks? One guy synthesised precursors (10 step synthesis) and another grow nanotubes from them? There are instruments so complex and sensitive that there are often 1 person in a group who can do crucial step (except you want to waste all your precious precursors for your own tries).

And above each of them "Publish or perish" sword.

I can say what publication in modern chemistry and material science CAN be monoauthor:

Reviews,

Pure_computations (now more in the way of theory and concepts),

Lowgrade synthetic paper where author tried to do everything himself.

All the previous comments are necessary but, in my opinion, this is something is subjective in nature, so we can not easily assume that who is real author directly because some authors have skills in how to find and analyze the idea but they didn't have a good writing skills in order to deliver their ideas. Others theoretically are good but practically have some probs. So I believe that the "real author" is not about the who is author, is about what the contribution that we get in the end, I think that important. Moreover, this idea can be achieved through activation the role of cooperation and networks among researchers in order for having a solid contribution at the end.

It is highly difficult to prevent this Seyed. May be this can be prevented if the main author takes a rigid stand to avoid that. However taking that stand also comes at a cost because you stand the risk of your article not being accepted for publication in any reputable journal. This is a very big problem in academia which needs attention.

All authors are the real authors.

Dr. Hassaan Tohid,

What is your opinion about real coauthor? Do you think all of the coauthors in publications are eligible to be as coauthor? For instance, someone who merely contributes as proofreader of English Grammar, or someone who is famous in special field without doing anything, and so on.

First author+ corresponding author

Prof. Nirmala S.V.S.G

According to your definition of first author, I want to know your opinion about WHO IS CORRESPONDING AUTHOR. May you please explain it and compare with first author?

The first author usually plans, finds the topic and collect most of the data. He is the one in charge of writing most of the article. He is much more important than the rest of other contributors.

researchers , professors , students , experts

All authors are real authors of scientific article but the one that contributed most should the the first author in a normal situation.

In another instance, I think the person that conceived the idea of the research should be the first author. It is my personal opinion.

Dear Seyed Mehdi Mohammadizadeh

I recommend to follow this slide deck: Authorship: Who should be the author of your research paper.

https://www.editage.com/insights/authorship-part-1-who-should-be-the-author-of-your-research-paper

This is subjective as posited by senior colleagues.

I agree with most of scholars' opinions here. I would like to add my own thought:

It is definitely unethical that the first author offers someone the corresponding author and wants him/her to edit the paper in terms of academic writing throughout the paper, or revise the manuscript following the first author's comments, or just put his/her name because of his/her reputation in a special field. The article virtually belongs to the first author. The others are all assistants. Thus, the first author must take the leadership in developing and revising the manuscript and politely ask for co-authors (including the corresponding author)'s scholarly advice and do his/her best to improve the quality of the paper following the colleagues' comments. That is to say, the first author must not dump the work on co-authors.

Authors are those who contribute in that article. It is not necessary to write the name of all contributors in the author list, some contributors can be acknowledged at the last of the article. It is up to first author how he wants other contributors to be acknowledged.

Dear Nirmala S.V.S.G

In my experience, generally if all the authors contribute equally, I do not want to publish as a single author. In my earlier articles I am working as a first author, but these days I love to encourage others to write articles and my self as a corresponding author or last author. If you look the research articles published in high impact journals, mostly they are co-authored by many authors.

In science, including in physics, there are a lot of pseudo-scientists (careerists) who write articles and dissertations for their graduate students. In order to determine who wrote this article, it suffices to take and pranalize several articles that are written by researchers working in this laboratory.

" Who is a REAL-AUTHOR in scientific article?"

-- WHY is it so damn important???!!!

A Real author is one that contribute truley to the manuscript as adesing or collection of data or revising all manusript including the patients and methods and results and discussion and appropriately citing the references

Guest authors should be avoided

I agree with @Dmitry Sharapa opinion completely about real author in articles of chemistry sciences.

" Who is a REAL-AUTHOR in scientific article?"

-- WHY is it so damn important???!!!"

Leonid V Vladimirov

***

All this, indeed, is not so important for Leonid.

**

".. it appears to me that such a practice is unethical. "

Michael Patriksson

***

For Leonid V Vladimirov this question is not interesting, since we all know that in his scientific articles the author is he (Leonid V Vladimirov).

And for me it is not important, since after reading all my articles and monographs, it is not difficult to see (guess) that I am the author of these scientific works (my co-authors, as a rule, the students and employees helped me to conduct experiments). Some of my articles are co-authors - my superiors, since without their fictitious co-authorship, I would have certain problems. In a number of scientific institutions and departments of universities of the USSR and the Russian Federation (not everywhere), the co-author of any (each, all) scientific work is the head of the institution (department).This happens even in those cases where the head of the institution or department is neither a co-author of the idea, nor a leader, and has no direct relation to a particular scientific work of the researcher (this is not ethical).

Recently, I was extremely surprised when I saw more than 150 researchers from different countries co-authors of several papers! It's awesome, amazing, maybe it's even funny, this is a terrific record. At the same time, the articles themselves are very interesting, contain very valuable information and conclusions, they are cited more than a thousand times (there are more than a thousand links to them).

I will not give links to these amazing articles written by more than 150 authors, these articles are in RG. I wonder if there are articles where the number of authors is 300 or 1000?

P.F. Zabrodskii

150 is baby talk. Exactly 5154... See early post here, please: (https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_any_limitation_for_the_number_of_scientific_articles_authors#view=5c063b90f8ea52674b29f754, answer of Dr.

Gomaa A. M. Ali (about month ago), article: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_any_limitation_for_the_number_of_scientific_articles_authors#view=5c063b90f8ea52674b29f754 )...

This is the population of a small city. I guess they all know each other and even greet ?...

It is funny, there are less than 1 word (about 0.8 according to my approximate calculation )...

5154, to be exact, a project based at CERN. Makes perfect sense, when trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, that there is a need for scientists from many disciplines.

My own record is 11 coauthots only... It means, that we are not scientists... So sad.

I knew an old Soviet professor from a research institute (...) (Moscow) —the head of the department — he still goes to the institute and does something there, which he always advised something after reading articles of your colleagues, useful or useless advice, he said: "Here is my idea, I pretend to co-author!".

In each article that was published by his staff (70-90s and early 2000s), he was a co-author.

It is no secret that many academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences have not read some monographs and textbooks, where they are co-authors.

That is - by defintion - research fraud, in fact. I hope this practice has stopped.

Why did it even start? It does not make sense to be dishonest - you're biting your self in the ass, basically, as everyone knows that the practice implies that you lie!

There I do not agree. I never did this, but the professor in question, choose the people, guided the people, discussed the projects and the results and with the passage of time, got more and more apart from the day to day, he was the leader and responsible for the sucesses and failires of the whoe department, hence he is co-author without fraud.

Very interesting discussion. I accept something. Something I do not accept. For example, I disagree with Vera Maura Fernandes de Lima. Dear Vera Maura Fernandes de Lima All that you have listed is job responsibilities. The person holds the position and for this he receives a reward. Maybe I'm wrong. But this is my opinion.

Vera Maura: "he was the leader and responsible for the sucesses and failires of the whoe department, hence he is co-author without fraud." - he was the leader without fraud, but he was a co-"author" only by evident fraud ["Author ... writer of a book, article etc." - The Penguin English Dictionary: the writer, not his boss or leader of a group!].

In my opinion, a co-author is a person who has made a creative contribution to the work. The only problem what is meant "creative". For example, most specialists in X-ray analysis pretend to co-authorship in the case of any analysis conducted by them. I think, it is still possible to agree with this approach, if they fully defined the structure (unknown before), but in the case of routine calculations of cell parametets etc. (which 90% of materials scientists can), is this a creative contribution? Same situation exists with other routine measurements. If researcher gave me untreated spectra, which I processing myself, is he a co-author? He is a measurer!

But processing the measurements is not a finish; you need to connect these with the other results. I know people (and worked with them) who not only measure, but also see further than curves and tables. But this is a rare exception.

So measurement is not creativity. Only in the case when the measurement results turn into general patterns and conclusions, only then the person who made these is your co-author. Otherwise - he is the doer.

As for the chefs, my first chef (I was lucky) always invited me to the office and discussed the text of the draft in detail. Sometimes his advices was very helpful, sometimes not so much, but he participated in writing and discussing any article that passed through the laboratory, regardless of whether he was a coauthor or not. He had his own works, which he also occasionally discussed with selected employees. The next chef simply put his signature on the article (permission for publishing), and inserted his name at the end of the list of authors ...

Any scientific paper done by a team, each member has a role in different steps of research from planning to write the full text. I don't think adding any others without role is acceptable.

By the way, the fashionable concept of "team". Teams are different. There are quite workable teams that set and solve serious problems. And there are just factories of articles (dissertations, monographs, etc.). Formally, these very difficult to distinguish using formal parameters. It is necessary to read the texts generated.

Well, in your question is also, how to avoid adding extra "authors" without real scientific contribution to the paper.

Generally, I would recommend the following:

1) Relative contribution - the most common way authors are listed. The author who most substantially worked on the draft article and the underlying research becomes the first author. The others are ranked in descending order of contribution. However, in many disciplines, the last author in a group might be the principle investigator—the person who supervised the work and came with the initial idea.

2) Or, you can go with a specific way by providing chapter in your paper, which will provide "Author Contributions":

Who designed and conducted the experiments, performed the data analysis, and wrote the manuscript; who supervised the research and edited the manuscript; who contributed to the experimental design and data analysis etc. Therefore, everything will be clear for the readers (and even for authors).

@Hynek Roubík

The centipede situation may happen: when it was asked which foot moving after the thirty-seventh, it start thought about it and could not move again.

Well said Hynek.

A real author must have contributed to a reasonable degree to the materialization of the research, from its conceptualization, execution and final manuscript writing.

The good way is what many journals have put in place. A paper submitted for consideration of publication must show exactly each author's contribution.

https://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7417-591a

Interesting discussion indeed.

Very interesting discussion. Please continue it in the same kind spirit

Leonid V. Vladimirov

Thanks for the insight Naham

A word of caution, perhaps: We ought not to spend a lot of time and worry on the possibilities that someone in the core writing team has taken on someone who has not contributed a whole lot. It appears to me that there will be little positive vibes coming out at the other end, but only bitter tears, harm, and wasted time.

And importantly: it's impossible to agree on what a minimum contribution is, AND in a team-work it may simply be impossible - do we enroll a control mechanism to check the hours spent reading, commenting, writing, ... ? No, it will only do harm to the team-work - skip it.

Instead: dig into your own work, knowing that you have a superior moral standard.

I have read elsewhere the idea that each paper should bear with it a statement at the end, on who did what; I bet that very few journal editors want to see any of that, as it eats space, and for crying out loud: we are adults, aren't we? Get a grip. I for one will not participate in that kind of pseudo-activity. :-)

I do agree with expert’s views

Very interesting and stimulating discussion and good contribution from our RG colleagues that provoked very valuable and challanging comments and answers

The real author is the one who suggests the idea of research and has most of the contribution in it.

For most journals the real author is most if the times the first author.