Authorship Guidelines

I encourage everyone in the lab to participate in writing. Writing is a declaration of ideas. As you organize your ideas and evidence, your revisions strengthen support for your conclusions. Rigorously prepared and published writing also happens to be the currency with which scientists are valued.

Here are some guidelines to help define authorship for articles of writing developed in the lab:

Informal Writing (blogs, lesson materials, etc.)

• Informal writing will often have a single or few authors. With many authors, you should consider a more formal structure.
• It should be clear at the beginning of an informal writing exercise who is the lead. They are the author.
• Additional contributors to informal writing may be acknowledged at the beginning of the text.

Formal Writing (peer-reviewed manuscript, EDIS document, etc.)

Adopted from Yale University Office of the Provost.

• Formal writing often has many authors. A discussion regarding intended authorship should occur early in the process.
• Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for its content. In the event of time, every effort should be made to include early contributors as co-authors with at least appropriate acknowledgement of the prior work from current co-authors.
• All co-authors should have maintained appropriate participation and responsiveness throughout the writing process and have been directly involved appropriately in contributing to manuscript milestones. Many journals list specific author contributions for acknowledgement. Co-authors formal contribution is approval of project and manuscript progress through:
  • planning, conception, design, conduct, analysis, and/or interpretation of the work leading to the paper or at least a portion of the results;
  • writing a draft of the paper or revising (and approving!) it for intellectual content; and
  • final approval of the version to be published. All authors should review and approve the manuscript before it is submitted for publication, at least as it pertains to their roles in the project.
• Author involvement should be clearly described in agreement with the publication location's submission guidelines (i.e., submission survey, publication byline).
• Any change to the list of authors during the project should be discussed and agreed upon by all co-authors.