Sole Authorship

Sole authorship describes a work credited to exactly one person, who alone meets whatever authorship criteria the publisher, field, or funder applies. Under the ICMJE’s widely adopted four-part test, that means one individual is responsible for substantial contribution to the work’s conception or design (or acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of its data); for drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; for final approval of the version to be published; and for agreeing to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including ensuring questions about its accuracy or integrity are investigated and resolved. In a multi-author paper these four conditions are met collectively, distributed across a byline. In a sole-authored work, one person meets all four alone.

Why sole authorship is a distinct case, not just “authorship with one name”

Most authorship-management concepts exist to resolve coordination problems between multiple contributors: who qualifies for the byline (the boundary CASRAI’s Authorship entry covers), what order names appear in, who is the corresponding author for correspondence and post-publication accountability, and — where a journal or funder requires it — how a CRediT contributor statement apportions specific roles (Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing, and so on) across named individuals. None of these questions has anywhere to attach in a sole-authored work. There is no order to negotiate, because there is only one name. There is no separate corresponding author to designate, because the sole author is inherently the point of contact. There is no CRediT role-split to document, because one person performed (or is credited with directing) every role a CRediT statement would otherwise divide up — which is why sole-authored papers commonly omit a contributor statement entirely, or include a brief one attributing all roles to the single author.

This also means the categories of authorship dispute that occupy a large share of COPE’s and ICMJE’s authorship guidance — gift authorship, ghost authorship, and order disagreements — are structurally absent from genuine sole authorship. If a dispute of that kind does arise around a nominally single-author work (for example, an unlisted contributor who argues they in fact met the authorship criteria), the work is, by definition, no longer a clean case of sole authorship; it has become a contested multi-author case being litigated as if it were sole-authored.

Accountability is concentrated, not distributed

The accountability element of the ICMJE criteria — agreeing to be answerable for the accuracy and integrity of the entire work — applies without dilution in sole authorship. In a multi-author paper, accountability is sometimes read (informally, and increasingly explicitly, via CRediT statements) as attaching most directly to the portions of the work an individual actually contributed to, even though ICMJE’s own position is that every listed author is accountable for the work as a whole. A sole author has no one else’s contribution to point to: responsibility for the full manuscript, from data to interpretation to any subsequent correction or retraction, rests with that one person alone. This is one reason some fields — particularly those where solo scholarship remains standard, such as much of the humanities, pure mathematics, and theoretical work in economics and philosophy — have historically applied close scrutiny to single-author submissions, since there is no second author to independently verify claims before submission.

Where sole authorship remains common

Discipline strongly predicts how often sole authorship occurs. It is still routine in philosophy, mathematics, history, and other largely single-investigator fields, and in research outputs tied to an individual credentialing process — most notably the doctoral dissertation or thesis, and articles derived directly from one. It is comparatively rare in biomedicine, large-scale experimental physics, and other fields organized around collaborative, resource-intensive research, where author counts in the tens, hundreds, or (in some physics collaborations) thousands are now unremarkable. Neither pattern is inherently more rigorous than the other; they reflect how each field’s underlying research is actually produced.