COPE Authorship Guidelines: Beyond ICMJE and CRediT

COPE authorship guidelines exist because knowing who qualifies as an author is only half the problem — the harder half is what to do when people disagree. ICMJE’s four criteria define who should be listed; CRediT’s contributor-role vocabulary describes what each person did; COPE’s guidance is the only one of the three built around process — journal policy, pre-submission agreement, and a defined path for investigating disputes before and after publication.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a UK-based membership organisation that provides journal editors, publishers, and institutions with guidance and case-by-case advice on publication integrity, including authorship. It does not set a competing definition of “author” — instead, it tells editors and institutions what to do when a definition, whether ICMJE’s or a discipline-specific equivalent, is contested.

• What is COPE and what do its authorship guidelines cover?
• Where do ICMJE’s criteria and CRediT’s roles stop?
• How does COPE’s authorship dispute process work?
• How does COPE define ghost, guest, and gift authorship?
• Common authorship questions answered
• Implications for institutions, journals, and researchers

What is COPE and what do its authorship guidelines cover?

COPE’s core authorship guidance is set out in its Discussion Document: Authorship, first published in 2014 and updated to version 2 on 20 September 2019. Unlike ICMJE, which publishes a fixed set of criteria for biomedical journals, COPE addresses authorship across all disciplines through discussion documents, position statements, case studies, and flowcharts aimed at editors and institutions rather than authors alone.

COPE states that two requirements are common to every authorship definition it has reviewed: a substantial contribution to the work, and accountability for the work and its published form. Everything else — order, thresholds, disciplinary norms — is left to journals and institutions to codify, provided the policy is transparent and published in the journal’s author guidelines.

Where do ICMJE’s criteria and CRediT’s roles stop?

ICMJE, CRediT, and COPE answer three different questions, and conflating them is the single most common source of confusion in editorial offices. ICMJE’s Recommendations require that an author meet all four of its criteria — substantial contribution to conception, design, or data; drafting or critical revision; final approval; and accountability. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014 to describe, with a controlled vocabulary of 14 roles, what each named contributor actually did on a paper. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Neither framework tells an editor what to do when two contributors dispute their place on that list.

This is the structural gap COPE fills: it does not compete with ICMJE’s criteria or CRediT’s contributor roles — it operationalises them. A journal can require ICMJE compliance, request a CRediT statement at submission, and still have no mechanism for handling a dispute unless it also adopts COPE-style process guidance.

How does COPE’s authorship dispute process work?

COPE’s approach treats authorship disputes as an editorial and institutional workflow, not a single adjudication. Its position on handling changes to authorship lists, published 20 August 2024, instructs editors to scrutinise any request to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission, confirm that all listed authors agree to the change in writing, and query the reason if consent is not unanimous.

Journals are explicitly told they are usually not equipped to adjudicate contested claims about who contributed what. COPE’s guidance directs editors to refer unresolved disputes to the authors’ affiliated institutions for formal investigation — a division of labour that ICMJE and CRediT are silent on. In the UK, this maps directly onto instruments such as the UK Research Integrity Office’s Model Authorship Dispute Procedure, published September 2025, which gives institutions a structured, impartial process for exactly this referral.

• Confirm authorship and order before submission, and keep a written record of the agreement.
• Treat any post-submission change to the author list as requiring signed consent from every listed and proposed author.
• Query unexplained additions, removals, or reordering rather than accepting them at face value.
• Refer disputes the journal cannot resolve to the authors’ institution for investigation.
• Use acknowledgements, not the author list, for contributions that fall short of authorship thresholds.

How does COPE define ghost, guest, and gift authorship?

COPE’s guidance gives editors concrete labels for the authorship failures that ICMJE’s criteria are designed to prevent but do not name. Ghost authorship occurs when someone who made a substantial contribution — often a medical writer or industry statistician — is omitted from the byline. Guest (or honorary) authorship is the reverse: someone is listed despite not meeting the substantial-contribution and accountability thresholds, typically because of seniority or influence. Gift authorship describes the same practice motivated by reciprocity or favour-trading between colleagues.

All three practices can technically pass an ICMJE checklist if contributions are misreported, and a CRediT statement can be filled in inaccurately with no built-in verification. COPE’s contribution is procedural: it recommends that authorship statements be corroborated at submission and that suspected guest or ghost authorship be investigated using the same institutional-referral pathway as other authorship disputes, rather than treated as a simple correction.

Common authorship questions answered

What are the ICMJE’s four authorship criteria?

The ICMJE requires that an author make a substantial contribution to conception, design, or data; draft or critically revise the work; give final approval of the version published; and agree to be accountable for its accuracy and integrity. All four criteria must be met, not just one.

What are the minimum requirements for authorship under COPE?

COPE identifies two requirements common to every authorship definition it reviewed: a substantial contribution to the work, and accountability for the work and its published form. Beyond these two, COPE leaves discipline-specific thresholds to individual journals and institutions to define transparently.

What is an authorship dispute?

An authorship dispute is disagreement over who should be listed as an author, in what order, or over the accuracy of a submitted author list. COPE’s guidance directs editors to first seek resolution among the authors themselves, then refer unresolved cases to the relevant institution for formal investigation.

What commonly causes author list disputes?

Disputes commonly arise from ghost, guest, or gift authorship, unclear contribution thresholds, late changes to author order, and the omission of contributors such as statisticians or writers. COPE recommends agreeing authorship in writing before submission to prevent most of these disputes from reaching the journal.

Implications for institutions, journals, and researchers

The practical takeaway for research administrators is that ICMJE compliance and a completed CRediT statement are necessary but not sufficient. A journal or institution without a COPE-aligned dispute procedure has defined who should be an author and how their contribution is described, but has no answer for what happens when someone disagrees. Institutions that adopt a written, COPE-referenced authorship policy — mirroring models such as UKRIO’s 2025 procedure — close that gap before a dispute reaches the point of a correction, retraction, or reputational damage.

As CRediT adoption continues to expand under NISO stewardship and journals increasingly request contributor statements at submission, the process layer COPE provides becomes more, not less, relevant: a more granular contribution record creates more surface area for disagreement about whether a given role meets an authorship threshold. Institutions that pair authorship policy with a clear, COPE-consistent dispute pathway are better placed to resolve those disagreements before they escalate.