Corresponding Author

The author formally designated, usually at submission, as a manuscript's single point of contact with a journal — responsible for administrative correspondence during submission and peer review, and for remaining reachable for reader queries, data requests, and correction or retraction correspondence after publication. The designation is independent of author order: it can, but need not, be the same person as the first or senior author.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 17 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A postdoc who led the experimental work and wrote the manuscript lists her own institutional email as the corresponding address, so editor correspondence and reader inquiries route to her rather than to the supervising PI.

Is an instance

On a multi-site clinical trial paper, the author team designates the lead statistician — not the first-listed author or the grant's PI — as corresponding author, since she is best positioned to field methodological queries after publication.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

Assuming the grant's Principal Investigator is automatically the corresponding author on every paper the grant produces: PI is a funding-governance role tied to the award, not to a specific manuscript, and the two roles are assigned independently — a PI who did not draft or submit a given paper is often not its corresponding author.

The corresponding author is the individual formally designated as a manuscript’s single point of contact with a journal — the person editors, reviewers, and later readers reach when they have a question about the submission, the peer-review process, or the published record. Per the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations, this person “takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process.”

Why the role exists

A manuscript can have one author or several dozen. Journals need exactly one reliable channel for time-sensitive administrative traffic — submission-system logins, requests for revisions, proofs, and (after publication) queries from readers, requests for data or materials, and corrections or retraction correspondence. Rather than every author being copied on every message, one person is named as the routing point. That single point of contact is what “corresponding author” means in practice; it is a communications and accountability designation, not a description of how much a person contributed to the underlying research.

How the corresponding author is designated

The author team chooses who serves in this role, usually at submission, by flagging one (or occasionally more than one) name in the journal’s submission system. There is no rule tying the designation to seniority or contribution order:

The corresponding author can be the same person as the first author or the senior/last author — on a small team this is common, since the person who did and wrote up the most work is often also best placed to answer questions about it.
The corresponding author is not required to be either. A postdoc or PhD student who ran the study may hold the byline’s first-author position while a supervising PI corresponds, or vice versa; a mid-list author with the most complete knowledge of the methods may be designated instead of whoever appears first or last on the author line.
Some journals permit co-corresponding authors — see co-corresponding author convention — typically to share the post-publication workload or to jointly recognise co-equal leadership, though not every journal allows it.

Corresponding author vs. first author vs. principal investigator

These three roles are frequently conflated but answer different questions. Author order (first, middle, last/senior) is a discipline-specific convention signalling relative contribution or seniority; it says nothing about who journals or readers should contact. Principal Investigator (PI) is a funding and project-governance role tied to a grant, not to a specific manuscript — a PI is not automatically the corresponding author on every paper their grant produces. “Corresponding author” is narrower than either: it is assigned per manuscript and exists solely to answer “who is the journal’s point of contact for this specific paper.”

What the designation does and does not cover

Being named corresponding author carries real, ongoing obligations — administrative completeness at submission, responsiveness through peer review, and open-ended post-publication accountability for data requests, corrections, and retraction handling. Those obligations are substantial enough that CASRAI covers them in their own right: see Corresponding Author Responsibilities: What ICMJE Actually Requires for the full breakdown of what ICMJE’s recommendations actually require at each stage. This entry covers only the definitional question of who the role is and why it exists.

It is also worth noting what the designation is not: it is not one of the 14 contributor roles in the CRediT taxonomy (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022), which classifies the nature of a person’s contribution to the research itself — conceptualization, data curation, writing, and so on — rather than their post-submission administrative function. A corresponding author’s CRediT contributions, if any, are recorded separately in the paper’s contributor statement. See CASRAI’s CRediT & Authorship Attribution hub for how the two vocabularies relate.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Corresponding Author"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/corresponding-author" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/corresponding-author",
  "name": "Corresponding Author",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/corresponding-author",
  "description": "The author formally designated, usually at submission, as a manuscript's single point of contact with a journal — responsible for administrative correspondence during submission and peer review, and for remaining reachable for reader queries, data requests, and correction or retraction correspondence after publication. The designation is independent of author order: it can, but need not, be the same person as the first or senior author.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/credit-extensions#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/corresponding-author",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-17T03:20:24",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}