Corresponding Author Duties Per ICMJE

“Corresponding author” is often shorthand for “the one whose email address is on the paper.” That undersells the role. Per the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations, the corresponding author carries a defined set of administrative and accountability duties that run from submission through the entire post-publication life of the article — not just being reachable.

This guide sets out what ICMJE’s own recommendations actually say the role entails, where the role’s boundaries are genuinely ambiguous (multiple corresponding authors, retraction ownership), and how it relates to adjacent CASRAI vocabulary — the CRediT taxonomy and the CRediT & Authorship Attribution cluster.

The operational definition, per ICMJE

ICMJE’s recommendations state plainly:

“The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process.”

That single sentence is doing more work than it looks like. It assigns one person primary responsibility for a communication channel that spans three distinct phases of a manuscript’s life — submission, peer review, and publication — not a single point-of-contact task at intake. The role is defined by ICMJE, but individual journals implement it through their own editorial policy (submission-system fields, whether co-corresponding authors are permitted, how correspondence is routed) — ICMJE sets the baseline expectation, not the exact mechanics.

During submission and peer review

ICMJE specifies two concrete duties here, distinct from each other:

Administrative completeness

“The corresponding author typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and disclosures of relationships and activities are properly completed and reported, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors.”

This is a checklist function: author list accuracy, ethics/IRB approval documentation, clinical trial registration (see CASRAI’s guide on clinical trial registration and reporting compliance for the related obligations that attach to a trial manuscript), and conflict-of-interest disclosures (see Conflict of interest disclosure) are all things the corresponding author is expected to confirm are complete before and during submission — notably, ICMJE explicitly allows this to be delegated to co-authors. The corresponding author is accountable for the outcome, not necessarily the one physically doing every step.

Editorial responsiveness

“The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer-review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way.”

This is the part closest to “point of contact,” but it’s a standing availability obligation across the full review cycle — revision requests, reviewer queries relayed by the editor, requests for clarification — not a single intake step.

After publication: the obligation doesn’t end at acceptance

This is the part most often left out of informal descriptions of the role. ICMJE’s recommendations continue:

“[The corresponding author] should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication.”

Two distinct duties are packed into that sentence:

Responding to post-publication critique — letters to the editor, published comments, or queries raised through a journal’s post-publication review mechanism.
Cooperating with data/information requests — if a journal or a reader asks for the underlying data behind a published claim, the corresponding author is the one ICMJE expects to be reachable and responsive. This connects directly to whatever data-availability commitment the paper made at submission (see Data availability statement and CASRAI’s guide on writing a data availability statement) — the corresponding author is effectively the person who has to make good on that statement if someone follows up on it. ICMJE’s own wording is about “data or additional information”; requests for physical research materials (reagents, cell lines, specimens) aren’t named specifically in this passage but are commonly routed the same way in practice, governed by whatever materials-sharing policy the funder, institution, or journal has in place.

Because this obligation has no stated end date, it’s a longer commitment than the phrase “corresponding author” tends to signal to someone taking on the role for the first time. A paper can be years old and still generate a legitimate data request the corresponding author is expected to field.

All authors remain accountable — this isn’t a liability shield

ICMJE is explicit that concentrating communication in one person does not concentrate responsibility for the work’s accuracy and integrity in that person alone:

“Although the corresponding author has primary responsibility for correspondence with the journal, the ICMJE recommends that editors send copies of all correspondence to all listed authors.”

Read against ICMJE’s four-part authorship criteria (substantial contribution; drafting or critical revision; final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work) — every listed author, not just the corresponding author, has already agreed to be accountable for the work as a condition of being an author at all. The corresponding author’s role is a communication and coordination function layered on top of that shared accountability, not a substitute for it. A corresponding author confirming “all authors approved the final version” before submission is, in effect, confirming that this shared-accountability condition has actually been met for every name on the byline — not just collecting signatures as a formality.

Retraction and correction correspondence: where ICMJE is less prescriptive than assumed

This is a genuinely ambiguous area worth stating plainly rather than guessing at. ICMJE’s guidance on retraction (in its scientific misconduct and retraction recommendations) states a preference for the original authors to retract their own work, but where authors are unwilling or unable, the editor may accept a retraction from another responsible party or retract under the editor’s own authority — final responsibility sits with the editor either way. ICMJE’s recommendations do not specifically name the corresponding author as the designated owner of retraction or correction correspondence.

In practice, because the corresponding author is already the established communication channel with the journal, they are typically the person an editor contacts first when a correction or retraction is being considered — but that’s a consequence of the existing correspondence relationship, not a separately stated ICMJE duty. If the corresponding author is unreachable, has left the institution, or is themselves the subject of the concern, the editor’s authority to act independently (per the paragraph above) is exactly the mechanism that exists to prevent the process from stalling. For the mechanics of how a retraction actually proceeds once initiated, see CASRAI’s guide on how a retraction actually happens, and for the terminology distinction, Retraction versus Correction (corrigendum).

Group authorship: a specific ICMJE requirement

ICMJE addresses one more corresponding-author-specific case directly:

“When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should specify the group name if one exists, and clearly identify the group members who can take credit and responsibility for the work as authors.”

For group/consortium authorship, the corresponding author has an explicit duty to make the group’s membership legible — who is claiming authorship credit (and therefore accountability) versus who is being acknowledged as a contributor without meeting the full authorship criteria.

Corresponding author vs. related roles

A few adjacent concepts are worth distinguishing, since they’re often conflated:

Corresponding author vs. first/senior author. ICMJE’s recommendations don’t require the corresponding author to be the first author or the senior/last author — author-order conventions are discipline- and journal-specific, and the corresponding-author role is defined by communication responsibility, not position in the byline.
Corresponding author vs. co-corresponding authors. ICMJE doesn’t itself prohibit or endorse more than one corresponding author on a paper; whether a journal permits co-corresponding authors is a matter of that journal’s own editorial policy. See CASRAI’s dictionary entry on the co-corresponding author convention for how this is typically handled when a journal allows it.
Corresponding author vs. CRediT roles. “Corresponding author” is a communication/administrative role, not one of the 14 CRediT contributor roles (Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, and so on). A corresponding author’s actual scientific contributions still need to be captured separately in a CRediT statement or equivalent contribution disclosure — being the point of contact says nothing on its own about what that person actually did on the project.

Frequently asked questions

Does the corresponding author have to be the most senior researcher on the paper?

No. ICMJE’s recommendations define the role by communication responsibility, not seniority or author order. In practice it’s often (though not always) a senior or supervising author, but that’s convention, not an ICMJE requirement.

Can a paper have more than one corresponding author?

ICMJE’s recommendations don’t prohibit it. Whether it’s allowed, and how correspondence is handled between multiple corresponding authors, is set by individual journal policy.

What happens if the corresponding author becomes unreachable years after publication?

ICMJE’s recommendations don’t specify a fallback procedure for this scenario. In practice, editors typically attempt to reach co-authors or the corresponding author’s former institution, and retain editorial authority to act (including retracting) without author cooperation where necessary — per ICMJE’s general retraction guidance discussed above.

Is the corresponding author personally liable for errors made by other authors?

ICMJE’s authorship criteria hold every listed author accountable for the work, not the corresponding author alone. The corresponding author’s distinct duty is being the primary communication channel with the journal, which is a coordination role layered on top of that shared accountability, not a substitute for it.

Is administrative paperwork (ethics approval, trial registration) always the corresponding author’s personal job?

ICMJE says the corresponding author “typically ensures” these are completed, and explicitly notes these duties “may be delegated to one or more co-authors.” The corresponding author is accountable for the outcome; the underlying work can be shared.

Related CASRAI resources

Sources: ICMJE, “Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors”; ICMJE, “Scientific Misconduct, Expressions of Concern, and Retraction”. Both fetched directly from icmje.org on 2026-07-09.