Two opposite failures corrupt the authorship record, and they are mirror images of each other. In one, a name appears on a paper that should not be there; in the other, a person who did substantial work is left off entirely. Both distort who is accountable for the published work, and both are forms of authorship misconduct that journals and integrity bodies treat seriously. This article explains what they are and how to avoid them, building on the account of authorship and accountability and the formal authorship criteria.
The starting point: authorship is accountability
You cannot define the abuses without first fixing what authorship is supposed to be. The dominant standard in biomedical and much of STEM publishing is the ICMJE recommendation, which sets four criteria, all of which an author should meet: substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. The decisive idea running through all four is accountability. An author is someone who can answer for the work, not merely someone connected to it. Every form of authorship abuse is, at bottom, a breaking of that link between credit and accountability.
Guest and honorary authorship: names that should not be there
Guest authorship, also called honorary or gift authorship, is the inclusion of a person as an author when they have not made a contribution meeting the authorship criteria. The motives are familiar:
- Adding a senior figure — a department head or laboratory director — whose name lends prestige but who did not contribute substantively to the specific work.
- Reciprocal arrangements, where colleagues add each other to papers to inflate both publication lists.
- Coercion, where a person in authority pressures a junior researcher to include them.
Whatever the motive, the effect is the same: a name on the author line carries an implicit claim of contribution and accountability that is false. It dilutes the credit owed to those who did the work, and it attaches accountability to someone who cannot genuinely answer for the research. Honorary authorship is not a harmless courtesy; it is a misrepresentation of the contribution record.
Ghost authorship: the writers who vanish
Ghost authorship is the opposite failure: someone who made a contribution that qualifies for authorship, or who did substantial work on the manuscript, is not named as an author and frequently not acknowledged at all. The classic and most damaging case is the professional medical writer, often funded by a commercial sponsor, who drafts a paper that is then published under the names of academic authors with no disclosure of the writer’s role. Ghost authorship is especially corrosive because it conceals influence: a reader cannot weigh a possible conflict of interest they cannot see. It hides who actually shaped the words and, sometimes, who paid for them.
There is a subtler, everyday version too. Postdocs, graduate students, and technicians who did substantial Investigation or Software work are sometimes pushed below the authorship line and into a footnote, or omitted entirely. Each instance erodes the integrity of the record by severing the contribution from the contributor.
How the ICMJE criteria prevent both
The elegance of a clear authorship standard is that the same test catches both abuses. Apply the four criteria honestly and the guest author fails them — they made no substantial contribution and cannot be accountable — so they should not be on the author line. Apply them honestly and the ghost is revealed — the medical writer who drafted the paper plainly meets the contribution and drafting criteria, so they must be named or, where they decline authorship, their role must be disclosed. The criteria are a bright line that, used in good faith, makes both the unearned name and the missing one visible.
A useful discipline: for every name on the author line, ask whether that person can answer for the work. For everyone who did substantial work, ask whether they appear. The first question catches guests; the second catches ghosts.
How CRediT helps — and one trap to avoid
The CRediT taxonomy strengthens the defence by making contribution explicit. When each author’s specific roles are recorded against the fourteen CRediT roles, a guest author has nowhere to hide: they must either claim a role they did not perform — a falsifiable and serious misstatement — or appear with no roles at all, which invites the obvious question. A transparent contribution statement makes honorary authorship costly to sustain.
But there is a trap. Because most publishers apply CRediT only to named authors, the taxonomy can inadvertently encourage a mild form of ghosting: authors, unable to credit the technician or writer who did the work, attribute that work to themselves. The fix is to credit contributors properly — through acknowledgements where authorship is genuinely not warranted, and by extending structured contribution metadata to acknowledged contributors as the standard evolves — rather than absorbing their roles into an author’s line.
What to do — for authors, supervisors and journals
- Agree authorship early. Decide, in writing, who will be an author and on what basis at the start of a project, and revisit it as contributions change. Most disputes and abuses grow from silence.
- Apply the criteria, not the hierarchy. Seniority is not a contribution. A director who did not contribute substantively should be acknowledged, not authored.
- Name the writers. Professional and medical writers must be disclosed; ghost-writing is incompatible with publication integrity.
- Use contribution statements. A CRediT statement confirmed by every named author makes both guests and ghosts harder to sustain.
- Follow COPE guidance when problems surface. The Committee on Publication Ethics provides flowcharts for editors handling suspected guest or ghost authorship; they set out a fair, documented process.
Where shared vocabulary fits
Terms like “guest”, “gift”, “honorary”, and “ghost” authorship are used loosely and sometimes interchangeably, which weakens policy that depends on them. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these precisely — pointing back to ICMJE for the criteria and COPE for the handling of misconduct — is what lets editors and institutions act on a common understanding. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the research-integrity domain.