Authorship

The formal status of being credited, by name, as a creator of a scholarly or scientific output (an article, dataset, software package, preprint, or similar citable work) because the named person meets a publisher's or field's explicit authorship criteria -- most commonly the ICMJE's four-part test: substantial contribution to the work's conception, design, or data; drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. All four conditions must be met together (an AND test, not an OR test) -- meeting some but not all of them qualifies a person for acknowledgement, not authorship. Authorship is deliberately narrower than 'did real work on this': doing qualifying work without being listed is a form of misattribution (ghost authorship), and being listed without doing qualifying work is also a form of misattribution (gift/honorary authorship).

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 11 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A postdoctoral researcher who helped design a study's methodology, analyzed the resulting data, drafted the results and discussion sections, approved the final submitted manuscript, and agreed to answer for the accuracy of the statistical analysis meets all four ICMJE criteria and is listed as an author.

Is an instance

In large multi-institutional collaborations such as the 2015 ATLAS/CMS joint measurement of the Higgs boson mass, authorship is granted collaboration-wide to everyone who meets the group's own membership and contribution rules at the time of submission, rather than being individually assessed against ICMJE's four criteria paper by paper -- a recognized, discipline-specific alternative to the biomedical-journal model.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A statistician who ran a pre-specified analysis exactly as instructed, with no involvement in study design, interpretation, drafting, or final approval, has made a real contribution but does not meet authorship criteria on that basis alone; the appropriate credit is acknowledgement or, where a CRediT statement is used, a Formal analysis role without an accompanying authorship byline. Adding a laboratory head as an author on every paper the lab produces, regardless of their involvement in that specific study, is not authorship under ICMJE's criteria either, even where it is standard practice in a given lab -- contribution must be assessed per work, not conferred by position.

Authorship is a formal, criteria-based status, not simply a synonym for “did some work on this.” Most journals and funders anchor their authorship policy to the ICMJE’s four-part test: substantial contribution to conception, design, or data (acquisition, analysis, or interpretation); drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including ensuring questions about its accuracy or integrity are investigated and resolved. All four conditions must be satisfied together — someone who meets three of the four should be acknowledged, not listed as an author.

Authorship vs. contributorship

Authorship and contributorship answer different questions. Authorship asks who qualifies to appear on the byline and take responsibility for the work. Contributorship, formalized by the CRediT taxonomy (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022), documents what each named person actually did, using 14 standardized roles such as Conceptualization, Data curation, and Funding acquisition. A person can appear in a CRediT statement without being an author — a statistical consultant credited for Formal analysis but not meeting the full authorship test — and CRediT does not by itself decide who is an author. It describes contribution after the authorship question has already been settled by the journal’s or field’s own criteria.

Who decides, and why the boundary matters

ICMJE is explicit that determining who meets authorship criteria is the responsibility of the author group itself, not the journal’s editors. Getting the boundary wrong in either direction is a recognized integrity failure: listing someone who did not do qualifying work is gift (or honorary) authorship; omitting someone who did is ghost authorship. COPE’s 2019 Discussion Document on Authorship, and COPE’s authorship-focused case flowcharts, exist specifically because disputes at this boundary — over order, inclusion, or omission — are one of the most common categories of case COPE’s member journals bring forward.

Discipline-specific variation

ICMJE’s test originated in biomedical publishing and is not universal. Mathematics and economics still commonly use alphabetical author order rather than a contribution-ranked order, on the reasoning that co-authors contributed as equals. Very large collaborations in particle physics and astronomy assign authorship collaboration-wide, based on the group’s own membership and contribution rules at the time of submission, rather than evaluating each individual against a four-part test paper by paper — the 2015 ATLAS/CMS joint measurement of the Higgs boson mass ran to 5,154 authors across a single Physical Review Letters paper as a well-documented example of this model. These are legitimate, field-specific implementations of the same underlying idea: authorship should track a real, verifiable form of contribution and accountability, even where the exact test differs.

References

ICMJE, “Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors” (Recommendations, current edition)
ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)
COPE Discussion Document: Authorship (September 2019)

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Authorship"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/authorship" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/authorship",
  "name": "Authorship",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/authorship",
  "description": "The formal status of being credited, by name, as a creator of a scholarly or scientific output (an article, dataset, software package, preprint, or similar citable work) because the named person meets a publisher's or field's explicit authorship criteria -- most commonly the ICMJE's four-part test: substantial contribution to the work's conception, design, or data; drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. All four conditions must be met together (an AND test, not an OR test) -- meeting some but not all of them qualifies a person for acknowledgement, not authorship. Authorship is deliberately narrower than 'did real work on this': doing qualifying work without being listed is a form of misattribution (ghost authorship), and being listed without doing qualifying work is also a form of misattribution (gift/honorary authorship).",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/credit-extensions#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/authorship",
  "sameAs": [
    "research authorship",
    "scholarly authorship",
    "publication authorship"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-11T17:40:19",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}