Authorship
Vorapong Phupong MD*, Surasak Taneepanichskul MD*, Sukhit Phaosvasdi MD*
Affiliation : * Members of Thai Medical Association
Currently, there have been a lot of research proposals submitted for publication in medical journals.
The incidence of authorship dispute and abuse is also rising in Thailand and worldwide(1,2). The questions of
authorship dispute include: who should be named as the authors?, who should be the first author?, whether or
not unnamed authors despite contributing to the research should be listed, and why do authors who do not
contribute to the research but have been named in the published articles. The reasons for authorship dispute
probably stem from the benefit of authorship:
• Contribution to the progress of science
• A sense of achievement
• Evidence of individual’s intellectual efforts
• Contribution to individual professional reputation
• Creation of currency for academic appointments and research funds
There is an example of authorship dispute in foreign countries(3). The second named author took legal
action, alleging that the first author had substituted her name for his as first author. Eventually, the second
author won because of original verbal agreement stating that second author should be first author.
There are international reports about the prevalence of honorary and ghost authorship in medical
journals(4,5). The honorary authorships are defined as an author who does not meet authorship criteria, who
have not participated in drafting or revising the review or have not approved it for submission. The ghost
authorships are defined as unnamed individual who participated in writing the article or have made substantial
contributions that merited authorship. The prevalence of honorary and ghost authorship in medical journals is
26-39% and 9-10% of review articles, respectively(4,5).
Regarding decreasing authorship dispute, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors
(ICMJS) or known as Vancouver Group has produced the “Uniform Requirement for Manuscripts Submitted to
Biomedical Journals”(6). In the authorship section, all of the three conditions must be met for authorship. These
include (1) the author’s contribution to conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) author
must draft the article or revise it critically for important intellectual contents; (3) in addition to the author’s
conception and design, author must contribute on final approval of the version to be published. Participation
solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. Indeed, listing of the
nature of work contributed by each person who appears on the byline is required for publication in the
respectable journals such as Lancet, New England Journal(7). This new custom still allows an act of giving
credits in the form of an acknowledgement to head of department, financial supporters and others who pro-
vided indirect help in the performance of the study(1,6). These practices are a part of good and ethical re-searcher(8-11).
There is a suggestion from Verhagen et al published in Nature 2003(12) about the Quantitative Uniform
Authorship Declaration (QUAD) system for fair sharing to all authors. They suggest a quantitative method for
evaluating authorship based on four categories of contribution: conception and design, data collection, data
analysis and conclusions, and manuscript preparation. Each author could claim their percentage share of the
total credit in each of the four categories. Authors are usually listed in descending order of total contribution
across all four categories.
In order to decrease the authorship dispute, we suggest that agreement of the authorship must be
made before performing the research. An agreement about the percent share and the order of authors should
also be made before performing the research too.
Keywords : Authorship, Dispute, Publication
