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CSE Recommendations for Group Authorship in Scientific Journals

Often, articles can include a group of investigators, such as nonauthor collaborators or authors working under a single group name. Such articles are known as collaborative, corporate, collective, or group author articles. Group author articles may involve any of the following permutations: the overall group, members of the group who take responsibility for authorship of the article (named individual authors), and members of the group who do not meet criteria for authorship of the article but have contributed significantly to the work that led to the article (nonauthor collaborators). A group should decide who will be an author before submitting the manuscript. (1-3)

CSE would like to thank the AMA Style Manual team for all their work on group authorship. The following recommendations incorporate much of their guidance from the Style Manual. (3)

CSE recommends the following:

For Journals and Publishers

  • The name of the group should be listed on the article byline. The article should make note of all individuals in the group and whether they are authors or nonauthor collaborators. In order to properly acknowledge and index the names of group members, there should be a note accompanying the group name on the byline. This note should list or link to a list of all group members and note whether they are authors or nonauthor collaborators.
  • All members of the group named as authors should meet criteria for authorship as defined by the journal’s policy regarding authorship, including approval of the final manuscript, and they should be prepared to take public responsibility for the work.
  • A nonauthor collaborator is defined as any type of contributor who is a nonauthor member of a formal group and who contributes significantly to the work but does not qualify for authorship. These individuals should be listed as collaborators in the Acknowledgments, Article Information section, Supplementary information, or Appendix. (2)
  • The article byline identifies who is directly responsible for the manuscript. MEDLINE identifies authors by whichever names appear on the byline. If the byline includes a group name, MEDLINE will list the group name and the names of individual group members if there is a note clearly stating that the individual names are elsewhere in the paper and whether those names are authors or collaborators. (1)
    • It is important to include and tag all authors and nonauthor collaborators in the article XML, otherwise, there is a risk that authors or collaborators not included in the main articles may not be properly indexed in bibliographic databases. (3)
  • Journals should note their policies about group authorship in their instructions for authors. The list of group author members should be published, but journals and authors should decide how they should be published on a case-by-case basis depending on many journal-specific parameters (e.g., does the journal publish a print version)? For example, a list of members may be 20 people, and that would appear within the article published online and in print. Other cases the list of investigators may be in the hundreds and space limitations are an issue in the print version/PDF. Those may be cases where the list is published as supplementary material, with the print version/PDF linking to it. Some journals are not able to enforce publishing the list of print if there are space limitations that need to be considered. (3)

  • CSE recommends not listing anonymous authors in a group authorship. Please see our recommendations paper for more information on anonymous authors. (4)

Examples of Bylines from the AMA Manual of Style (3)

Individual Authors and a Group

The byline contains the names of individual authors and the name of the group. Use of the connector and indicates that there are other individual authors who are not named in the byline but are members of the group and are listed somewhere else in the article such as the Acknowledgments, Appendix, Supplementary Material, or Article Information as referenced above. When individual authors are writing with a group (i.e., “and” connecting the individuals to the group in the byline), all members of that group should qualify for authorship. Their names should be listed on the title page separate from the byline, and they should be identified as authors.

Byline: Author 1, Author 2, Author 3; and the Group Author Name

Byline Example: Steven Q Smith, MD, Yoko Suzuki, MD, J T Mann, PhD, Klaus T Schulze, MD, Christine DeAngelo, MD, Charles Davis, MD, PhD, Katherine J Jones, MD; and the Generic Coalition Group

Individual Authors for a Group

The byline contains the names of individual authors and the name of the group. Use of the connector for indicates that the authors in the byline represent the group, which includes others who are not authors. However, the nonauthor group members may be listed somewhere else in the article (for example, in the Acknowledgments or Appendix). When individual authors are writing on behalf of a group (i.e., “for the” or “on behalf of” connecting the individuals to the group in the byline), some members of the group may qualify for authorship. Their names should be listed on the title page separate from the byline, and they should be identified as authors. (In cases where the list of nonauthor collaborator names is excessively long, this list can be supplied in a separate document.)

Byline: Author 1, Author 2, Author 3; for the Group Author Name

Byline Example: Steven Q Smith, MD, Yoko Suzuki, MD, J T Mann, PhD, Klaus T Schulze, MD, Christine DeAngelo, MD, Charles Davis, MD, PhD, Katherine J Jones, MD; for the Generic Coalition Group

Group Name in Byline, With All Group Members Qualifying as Authors

The byline contains the group name but no named individual authors. All members of the group are authors, and each individual should be listed on the title page or linked to a list separate from the byline, and they should be identified as authors. They are tagged as authors for indexing by Medline and other databases. In this case, no members of the group are nonauthors. It is recommended that at least 1 person serve as the corresponding author and be named as an individual who will coordinate questions about the article. This person can be named in the affiliation footnote as corresponding author. (3)

Byline: Group Author Name

Byline Example: Generic Coalition Group

References

  1. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. [accessed October 25, 2022.] https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/
  2. Fontanarosa P, Bauchner H, Flanagin A. Authorship and Team Science. JAMA. 2017;318(24):2433–2437. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.19341
  3. AMA Manual of Style Committee, AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors, 11th ed. (New York, 2020; online edn, AMA Manual of Style, 3 Feb. 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/jama/9780190246556.001.0001, accessed 10 Jan. 2023.
  4. Council of Science Editors. Recommendations for promoting integrity in scientific journal publications. [accessed February 23, 2023.] https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorial-policies/publication-ethics/

Authors

Jill Jackson, Annals of Internal Medicine
Stacy Christiansen, JAMA

The CSE Editorial Policy Committee revised the statement and approved in April of 2023. The CSE Board approved the statement in July of 2023.

Archive

2005   Recommendations for Group-Author Articles in Scientific Journals and Bibliometric Databases