v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 1,610 entries across 24 domains · CC-BY 4.01,610 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack DStablev2026.2

Gift authorship

The inclusion as an author of a person who did not meet the substantive authorship criteria, typically as a courtesy, in exchange for resources, or for prestige. An authorship is a gift when removing the named person would not require any change to the manuscript.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Ask about Gift authorship

Answers are drawn from this dictionary entry and the rest of the CASRAI corpus, with a link to every source.

Answers are AI-generated from CASRAI’s own published pages and can be wrong, so check the linked sources before relying on one; your question is logged without personal data — never sold, never used to train a third-party model — to show us what CASRAI is missing, so please do not type personal or confidential details. How we use this

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
Listing a department head as the senior author on every paper from the department regardless of their actual contribution to a given project.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
Listing as an author a senior colleague who designed the analytical framework, critically revised the manuscript, and approved the submitted version.

Editorial commentary

Gift authorship (also 'honorary' or 'guest' authorship) violates ICMJE's authorship criteria, which require substantive contribution to conception/design or data acquisition/analysis/interpretation, drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability. It is often given to department heads, grant holders who did not contribute intellectually, or as quid pro quo. CRediT taxonomy and explicit author-statement requirements have reduced but not eliminated the practice.

References

ICMJE Recommendations on authorship (current edition)
COPE Discussion Document: Authorship (2019)

Also known as

honorary authorship · guest authorship · courtesy authorship

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/gift-authorship",
  "name": "Gift authorship",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/gift-authorship",
  "description": "The inclusion as an author of a person who did not meet the substantive authorship criteria, typically as a courtesy, in exchange for resources, or for prestige. An authorship is a gift when removing the named person would not require any change to the manuscript.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-integrity#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/gift-authorship",
  "sameAs": [
    "honorary authorship",
    "guest authorship",
    "courtesy authorship"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:52",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

View CASRAI adoption →