Project Collaborator & Authorship
A project collaborator is someone that substantially contributes to the project by:
- providing research ideas, formulating the problem or hypothesis
- providing supportive functions such as project/paper designing, and structuring the experimental design
- recruiting participants or animals as well as collecting or entering the data
- Organizing, conducting, suggesting or advising statistical analysis
- Interpreting the results and/or integrating diverse theoretical perspectives,
- Writing a major portion or critical reviewing the project report/ paper
A project collaborator will be warranted authorship in every document resulting from any project if they actively participate in at least 3 of the listed topics. Lesser contributions, which do not constitute authorship, may be acknowledged in a note. Acquisition of funding or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.
Authorship order
In the case of most biomedical research publications, it is widely accepted that the first author is the person who has carried out a majority of the work project. Senior author is typically the last person on an authorship list, being the individual who “generally direct, oversee, and guarantee the authenticity of the work reported” and “implicitly take responsibility for the work’s scientific accuracy, valid methodology, analysis, and conclusions”, i.e., takes responsibility for the project as a whole. The authorship order should be approved by consensus among all project collaborators.
