SERVICES » Biostatistics Analysis Center (BAC)

Policy on Authorship

All BAC staff members who contribute substantially to a manuscript are expected to qualify for authorship with the following guidelines in mind. These guidelines are from the Biomedical Graduate Studies Authorship Policy, which in turn draws from the International Council of Medical Journal Editors Requirements (Annals of Internal Medicine 1977;126:36-47).

  1. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content.
  2. Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to each of the following areas:
    • conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data,
    • drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content,
    • final approval of the version to be published.
  3. Conditions a, b, and c in item 2 must all be met by one or more of the named authors.
  4. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship.
  5. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship.
  6. Appropriate credit for the contributions of other individuals to the work described in the publication should be made as an acknowledgment.
  7. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author. If the author is a student, then the faculty mentor shares the responsibility.
Under these guidelines, authorship for a BAC staff person can be justified in two ways: 1) in terms of time spent on contributing to the manuscript; and 2) reviewing the manuscript for submission. First, authorship should not be dictated strictly by any time spent on a project, the quantity of time and nature of the contribution are relevant. For instance, it would not be reasonable to expect authorship for a one-hour session in which a BAC statistician suggests a simple analysis that the investigator performs on his/her own. However, brief consultations should qualify a BAC staff member for co-authorship consideration if an important intellectual contribution arises from that consultation. At the other extreme, there have been several projects involving 100 hours of staff statistician time. Clearly, this situation calls for authorship for the staff statistician.

Second, authorship should be justified because of the imperative that the BAC staff member review manuscripts prior to submission. Review includes checking tables and other numbers in the text for errors as well as assessing the methods and results sections for accuracy and appropriateness. Given the level of review of the manuscript, it is appropriate to consider the BAC staff for authorship.

Given the above justifications, it is expected that BAC staff always be considered for authorship.

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