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J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2006;131:517-519
© 2006 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery

Editorial

Put my name on that paper: Reflections on the ethics of authorship

Department of Surgery and Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Received for publication August 24, 2005; accepted for publication September 27, 2005.

^_* Address for reprints: Martin McKneally, MD, 77 Forest Grove Dr, Toronto, Ontario M2K 1Z4, Canada (Email: martin.mckneally@utoronto.ca; dmckneally@sympatico.ca).

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

At a recent meeting of the Journal's Editors, questions arose about how many authors can reasonably be listed on a published paper, and what qualifies a contributor to be an author. Editor Andy Wechsler asked me to explore some of these issues, including their ethical implications.

Authorship certainly involves ethical values, such as truthfulness, trustworthiness, and fairness. Safeguarding the integrity of the Journal as a trusted official publication of our profession is an ethical obligation of the editors, peer reviewers, authors, and readers. I will try to sketch a conceptual framework for thinking about authorship that includes some definitions, ethical considerations, and authorship policies that have been adopted by other journals. Then I'll make some suggestions for readers' consideration and comments.

Conceptual Framework

Defining Authorship
An author is an originator, based on the word's Latin and Greek roots, and authorship is a justified claim to be an originator or progenitor. As the concept of authorship in medical science has evolved, authorship has come to include a claim to originality or other scientific value of published work, responsibility for the veracity and reliability of the report, and ownership of the work as intellectual property. Though copyright may be transferred, for example, to The American Association for Thoracic Surgery as a condition of publication in the Journal, the author retains scientific and public responsibility and credit for the invention, discovery, or formulation reported.

The defining qualifications for a valid claim to authorship have been the subject of helpful discussion by a number of thoughtful editors and writers. Because authorship is a somewhat notional concept (there are many notions of what it means to be an author and no widely accepted scientific definition), opinions vary about minimum qualifying standards. Drummond Rennie, the deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, has . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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				M. McKneally Reply to the Editor J. Thorac. Cardiovasc. Surg., April 1, 2007; 133(4): 1122 - 1122. [Full Text] [PDF]