ICMJE Authorship Criteria First Author vs CRediT Contributor Roles

The ICMJE authorship criteria for a first author are exactly the same as the criteria for every other author — the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors sets four cumulative conditions that any contributor must meet to be named an author at all, and it applies no separate, stricter, or additional test to whoever appears first on the byline. CRediT then answers a completely different question: what, specifically, did each already-qualifying author do.

ICMJE authorship criteria are four cumulative conditions — substantial contribution, drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability — that determine who is entitled to appear on a byline at all, independent of position or order.

• What are the ICMJE’s four authorship criteria?
• Does ICMJE set a separate standard for the first author?
• What is CRediT, and how does it differ from an authorship criterion?
• Where do COPE guidelines and the corresponding author fit?
• A decision flow: applying ICMJE and CRediT together
• Frequently asked questions
• Implications for editors and institutions

What are the ICMJE’s four authorship criteria?

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on four criteria, and all four must be met by every person named as an author — there is no partial credit and no exemption for a shorter or longer byline position. The framework is a gate, not a scale: a contributor is either inside it or outside it.

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data.
2. Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content.
3. Final approval of the version to be published.
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including ensuring that questions about accuracy or integrity are investigated and resolved.

Contributors who meet fewer than all four criteria should not be listed as authors; the ICMJE directs that they be acknowledged instead, with contributions such as funding acquisition, general supervision, or technical editing named as examples that do not, alone, justify authorship. The ICMJE also states plainly that it is the collective responsibility of the authors — not the journal — to determine that everyone named meets all four criteria.

Does ICMJE set a separate standard for the first author?

No. The ICMJE’s Recommendations explicitly state that “the criteria used to determine the order in which authors are listed on the byline may vary, and are to be decided collectively by the author group and not by editors.” There is no ICMJE clause that names a “lead” or “first” author category, and no additional hurdle applies once the four-criteria gate has been cleared.

What functions as “first authorship” is convention, not policy: in most biomedical and life-science fields, the first-listed name is understood to signal the largest single contribution to conception, execution, and drafting. Some journals — The Lancet among them — accommodate this by allowing a footnote to mark co-first authorship on the article itself, while still not recognising co-first status in indexed reference lists. Confusing byline position with the ICMJE’s eligibility test is the single most common misreading of the guidance.

What is CRediT, and how does it differ from an authorship criterion?

CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a standardised set of 14 role terms used to describe the specific contribution each named author made to a published work — for example Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing – original draft, or Supervision. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and it is descriptive rather than gatekeeping: it never decides who counts as an author, only what an author who already qualifies actually did.

• Conceptualization
• Data curation
• Formal analysis
• Funding acquisition
• Investigation
• Methodology
• Project administration
• Resources
• Software
• Supervision
• Validation
• Visualization
• Writing – original draft
• Writing – review & editing

The practical distinction editors need is structural, not just semantic:

Where do COPE guidelines and the corresponding author fit?

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) supplies the process layer that ICMJE deliberately leaves out: what to do when authors disagree. COPE publishes flowcharts and discussion documents for suspected authorship disputes, and — consistent with ICMJE’s own position — directs editors not to arbitrate who qualifies as an author, instead pointing conflicts back to the author group or, if unresolved, the institution where the work was performed.

The corresponding author is a separate role again. Per ICMJE, the corresponding author “takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process” and remains available after publication to respond to queries about the work. A corresponding author is frequently also the first author, but the two roles are not linked by any rule; either can be assigned independently by the author group.

A decision flow: applying ICMJE and CRediT together

Editors and research offices increasingly need to run both frameworks in sequence rather than treat them as competitors. A practical order of operations:

1. Apply the ICMJE gate first. For each contributor, check all four criteria. Anyone who fails even one moves to the acknowledgements section, not the byline.
2. Let the author group set order. Byline position, including who is “first,” is negotiated among qualifying authors — not assigned by the journal.
3. Tag CRediT roles per author. Once the byline is fixed, the corresponding author records which of the 14 CRediT roles each author performed; multiple authors can share a role, and one author can hold several.
4. Confirm the corresponding author. Designate who handles submission, peer review, and post-publication accountability — independently of first-author status.
5. Escalate disputes via COPE, not the editor. If agreement breaks down, follow COPE’s authorship-dispute process and route unresolved cases to the authors’ institution.

Frequently asked questions

What is the authorship criteria for the first author?

There is no separate ICMJE criteria for a first author. Every author, regardless of byline position, must meet the same four cumulative conditions: substantial contribution, drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability. Byline order is a convention the author group negotiates, not an ICMJE rule.

Who is responsible for determining authorship under ICMJE?

The authors themselves are responsible, ideally deciding at the planning stage and confirming before submission. ICMJE states it is not the role of journal editors to determine who qualifies or to arbitrate authorship conflicts; unresolved disputes go to the researchers’ institution instead.

Does the Lancet allow co-first authors?

The Lancet permits a footnote marking two authors as joint first authors on the published article itself, reflecting equal contribution. However, it does not recognise co-first authorship in indexed reference lists, where only the conventional first-listed name is retained.

What counts as the first author on a paper?

“First author” is a disciplinary convention, not an ICMJE category: it typically denotes the contributor judged to have made the largest share of the conception, execution, and drafting work. The author group — not the ICMJE and not the journal — decides who occupies that position.

Implications for editors and institutions

Treating ICMJE and CRediT as one merged checklist creates real friction: institutions have rejected tenure and grant applications over ambiguous “author order equals contribution” assumptions that the ICMJE never actually endorses. Separating the two frameworks resolves that friction directly — the eligibility question and the contribution question can be answered independently, in either order, without one distorting the other.

As submission systems increasingly capture CRediT tags alongside ORCID iDs at the point of manuscript intake, research offices gain a byline that is both defensible under ICMJE’s accountability standard and legible at the level of individual contribution — useful for hiring, promotion, and funder reporting alike. Institutions building authorship policy should document both layers separately: an ICMJE-based eligibility check, and a CRediT-based contribution record, rather than a single blended authorship form.