TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY
School of Physical Therapy
AUTHORSHIP/CREDIT EXPECTATION
The faculty of TWU’s School of Physical Therapy supports the use of the Uniform Requirements
for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, Writing and Editing for Biomedical
Publication from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) for authorship
and participation. The ICMJE created the Uniform Requirements primarily to help authors and
editors in their mutual task of creating and distributing accurate, clear, easily accessible reports
of biomedical studies. These guidelines are available at http://www.icmje.org
Regarding authorship, the ICMJE states:
• An “author” is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a
published study, and biomedical authorship continues to have important academic, social, and financial implications.
• The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has recommended the following criteria for authorship; these
criteria are still appropriate for those journals that distinguish authors from other contributors.
• Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or
analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.
• When a large, multi-center group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct
responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship/contributorship
defined above and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict of interest
disclosure forms. When submitting a group author manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the
preferred citation and should clearly identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals will generally
list other members of the group in the acknowledgements. The National Library of Medicine indexes the group name
and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript.
• Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify
authorship.
• All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
• Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of
the content.
• Some journals now also request that one or more authors, referred to as “guarantors,” be identified as the persons
who take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article, and publish that
information.
• Increasingly, authorship of multi-center trials is attributed to a group. All members of the group who are named as
authors should fully meet the above criteria for authorship/contributorship.
• The group should jointly make decisions about contributors/authors before submitting the manuscript for
publication. The corresponding author/guarantor should be prepared to explain the presence and order of these
individuals. It is not the role of editors to make authorship/contributorship decisions or to arbitrate conflicts related
to authorship.
Regarding contributors listed in acknowledgements, the ICMJE states:
• All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section.
Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing
assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Editors should ask corresponding authors to
declare whether or not they had assistance with study design, data collection, data analysis, or manuscript
preparation. If such assistance was available, the authors should disclose the identity of the people that provided this
assistance and the entity that supported it in the published article. Financial and material support should also be
acknowledged.
• Groups of persons who have contributed materially to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship
may be listed under a heading such as “clinical investigators” or “participating investigators,” and their function or
contribution should be described—for example, “served as scientific advisors,” “critically reviewed the study
proposal,” “collected data,” or “provided and cared for study patients.”
• Because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions, all persons must give written permission to
be acknowledged.
