CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: authorship disputes

  • Resolving author-order disputes: prevention and the COPE approach

    Few conflicts in research are as common, or as bitter, as a dispute over who appears where on the author line. The stakes are real: in many fields position carries career-defining information, and a demotion from first to second author can shape a hiring or tenure decision. These disputes are also largely preventable, and where they are not, there is a well-established process for handling them fairly. This article covers both, drawing on the practical guidance at resolving authorship disputes and the conventions of author order.

    Why author order carries so much weight

    To prevent disputes you have to understand what is being fought over. In many disciplines, position on the author line is not decorative; it is information. By widespread convention, the first author is the person who contributed most — typically the researcher who did the bulk of the work and wrote the draft. The last author is, in many fields, the senior position: the principal investigator or laboratory head who supervised the work. The corresponding author takes responsibility for the manuscript through review and after publication and is the point of contact for the record. Other conventions exist — alphabetical ordering is standard in mathematics, economics, and parts of the humanities, where order carries no contribution signal at all.

    The trouble is that these conventions are field-specific, tacit, and sometimes contradictory. A collaboration spanning disciplines may contain people who each “know” a different rule. When the rule is unstated, the gap fills with assumption, and assumption is where disputes are born.

    Prevention: the single most effective measure

    The overwhelming majority of author-order disputes can be avoided by one practice: agreeing authorship and order early, explicitly, and in writing — and revisiting the agreement as the work evolves. An early conversation forces the tacit conventions into the open, surfaces disagreement while it is still small, and creates a record to refer back to. The conversation should cover who will be an author at all (under the field’s authorship criteria), the basis for ordering, who will be corresponding author, and how the agreement will be revised if contributions shift. Projects change; an authorship agreement made at the outset should be treated as living, not fixed.

    Almost every intractable author-order dispute traces back to a conversation that never happened. The five minutes of awkwardness in agreeing order at the start of a project is the cheapest insurance in research.

    How CRediT helps prevent and de-escalate

    A contribution statement does not, by itself, decide order — and it is important to be clear that CRediT does not encode author order. It records what each person did, not where they sit on the line. But that very transparency is a powerful preventive tool. When a team fills in a CRediT statement together, mapping each person’s work to the fourteen roles, the relative contributions become explicit and discussable on the basis of fact rather than feeling. A disagreement about order can then be grounded in “who did what”, which is far easier to resolve than a clash of unspoken expectations. CRediT will not tell you who should be first author; it will give you the shared, honest picture of contribution from which a fair ordering conversation can proceed.

    When prevention fails: the COPE approach

    Sometimes a dispute arrives anyway — a co-author objects to the order at submission, or a contributor demands to be added or removed, or a conflict erupts after acceptance. Editors are not left to improvise. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) publishes flowcharts and guidance for exactly these situations, including changes to authorship after submission and disputes over who should be listed. The COPE approach has a consistent shape worth understanding:

    • The journal does not adjudicate the merits. Editors are not equipped, and have no standing, to decide who really contributed most. Their role is to ensure a fair, documented process, not to rule on the underlying contribution claim.
    • All listed and proposed authors must agree to any change. An author cannot be added, removed, or reordered without the documented agreement of all parties concerned.
    • The dispute is referred to the institution. Where authors cannot agree, COPE directs editors to ask the authors’ institution(s) to investigate, because the institution — not the journal — has the authority and the facts to resolve a contribution dispute.
    • The manuscript is paused, not pushed through. Publication is typically held until the dispute is resolved, so that the journal does not put its name to a contested authorship record.

    This division of labour is deliberate. The journal protects the integrity of the record by refusing to publish a disputed author list; the institution, which employs the people and holds the project records, does the fact-finding. Following the COPE flowchart gives editors a defensible, even-handed process and protects everyone involved from arbitrary decisions.

    A note on changing authorship after submission

    Requests to add or remove an author after submission are a frequent flashpoint and deserve particular care. A legitimate request — a contributor was genuinely overlooked, or a listed person turns out not to meet the criteria — should be handled transparently, with a clear written explanation and the agreement of all authors. A request that looks like a late attempt to add a guest author, or to remove someone out of conflict, is exactly the situation the COPE guidance is built to slow down and document. The bright line is the same one that governs authorship generally: the list must reflect genuine contribution and accountability, not convenience or pressure.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    “First author”, “corresponding author”, “senior author”, and the meaning of order itself vary by discipline, and that variation is a frequent source of cross-field confusion. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these roles and conventions precisely — pointing back to COPE for dispute handling and to ICMJE for the authorship criteria — is what lets collaborators from different fields negotiate on common terms. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the research-integrity domain.

    Related reading

  • Responsible conduct of research: training, culture and the integrity ecosystem

    It is tempting to imagine that research integrity is secured by rules: define misconduct clearly enough, publish the policy, and trust will follow. But anyone who has worked in research knows that the hardest integrity questions are rarely about clear-cut fabrication or plagiarism. They are about the grey areas — how to handle an awkward result, who deserves to be an author, what to do about a supervisor’s expectations, how much detail to report. These are resolved less by rulebooks than by the training researchers receive, the culture of the environments they work in, and the institutions that support good practice and respond when it fails. Together these form an integrity ecosystem. This article examines that ecosystem — responsible conduct of research training, research culture, and the bodies that uphold integrity — drawing on the research integrity domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Beyond the binary of misconduct

    Research integrity is often framed around its most serious violations — fabrication, falsification and plagiarism — and those are rightly treated as gravely wrong. But focusing only on the extremes misses where most integrity is actually won or lost. Far more common, and far more corrosive in aggregate, are the everyday questionable practices: selective reporting of results, inappropriate authorship, sloppy record-keeping, inadequate description of methods, the small compromises made under pressure. These rarely trigger a formal investigation, yet they undermine the reliability of the literature just as surely. A mature view of integrity, therefore, is not merely about catching the worst behaviour but about cultivating the everyday good practice that prevents the slide toward it. That is fundamentally a matter of training and culture, not enforcement alone.

    Responsible conduct of research training

    Responsible conduct of research (RCR) training is the educational component of the ecosystem: structured instruction in the principles and practices of doing research well. Good RCR training goes well beyond reciting the definitions of misconduct. It covers the design and management of data, the responsible use of methods, the norms of authorship and contributorship, the handling of conflicts of interest, the ethics of working with human participants and animals, mentoring relationships, peer review, and how to navigate the genuine dilemmas that arise in practice. Its purpose is formative rather than merely cautionary: to help researchers internalise good practice as a professional habit, and to give them the vocabulary and confidence to recognise and discuss integrity questions before they become problems. Training works best early and repeatedly, woven through a research career rather than delivered once as a compliance exercise.

    Research culture: the environment that shapes behaviour

    Training has limited effect in a hostile environment. The single most powerful determinant of whether researchers act with integrity is the culture around them — the incentives, pressures, examples and norms of their immediate setting. A culture that rewards quantity over quality, that prizes positive results, that tolerates exploitative mentoring, or that punishes the admission of error, will undermine the best training. A culture that values careful work, supports the reporting of negative or null results, models good authorship practice, and makes it safe to raise concerns will reinforce it. Much of the recent attention to research integrity has accordingly shifted toward research culture — recognising that you cannot train your way out of an environment whose incentives push in the wrong direction. Changing culture is slower and harder than running a course, but it is where the deepest gains lie.

    The institutions of the integrity ecosystem

    Surrounding training and culture are the bodies that set expectations, offer guidance and respond to allegations. These operate at different levels and play complementary roles:

    • National oversight and policy bodies establish standards and, in some systems, handle allegations involving publicly funded research. In the United States, for example, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) oversees integrity in research funded through its remit.
    • National advisory and support organisations promote good practice and offer guidance to institutions and researchers. In the United Kingdom, the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) provides independent, confidential advice and education on research integrity.
    • Institutions themselves carry the front-line responsibility: providing training, fostering culture, maintaining policies, and investigating concerns fairly when they arise.
    • Journals, publishers and editorial bodies uphold integrity at the point of publication, through editorial policies, correction and retraction processes, and shared community guidance.

    No single layer is sufficient alone. The strength of the ecosystem comes from their overlap: training informs culture, culture is reinforced by institutional expectations, and oversight bodies provide both standards to aspire to and a backstop when prevention fails.

    Where integrity meets everyday practice

    The integrity ecosystem is most visible not in dramatic misconduct cases but in the ordinary disputes it helps prevent and resolve. Authorship is the classic example: disagreements over who should be named, in what order, and on what basis are among the most common and most damaging integrity problems in everyday research life, and they are best handled through clear norms, transparent contribution practices and, where needed, fair institutional processes — the subject of our guidance on resolving authorship disputes. Many such disputes never arise at all when contribution is recorded honestly and explicitly from the outset. Structured contributorship through the CRediT taxonomy — whose roles are described in our overview of the CRediT roles — supports integrity in exactly this way, by making who-did-what a matter of explicit record rather than later contention.

    A shared language for integrity

    Integrity training, culture and oversight all depend on people meaning the same things by the same terms — what counts as authorship, what constitutes a conflict of interest, what a particular contribution amounts to. When those terms drift between institutions, training schemes and policies, the ecosystem fractures. A consistent vocabulary keeps it coherent, which is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: shared definitions so that the concepts at the heart of responsible conduct are understood the same way across the training, the culture and the institutions that together make research trustworthy.