I have been asked for advice by a research group about the order of listing authors and would value comments from WAME members.

What should they do when postgrad students who complete a research project in their lab leave for another job (sometimes in another country, and often leaving academia altogether) and do not follow up on the manuscript, leaving the thesis committee members to draft or finalize a manuscript?

Time passes and nothing is submitted (because more work is needed on the manuscript) or the paper is rejected and needs a lot of work to re-submit. They ask whether the original order of listing authors should change (the normal arrangement would be for the postgrad to be the first author)?

They are dealing with one such case at present and the majority opinion is that the postgrad should retain first authorship (though some disagree, hence the query), but that the order of other authors and the corresponding author may change. Thus, whoever puts most time into revising the draft and addressing the referees' comments will have a higher author rank (second) or may become the corresponding author (last). Would this change between submission and publication be acceptable to journal editors?

The thesis committee also wonders what rights the postgrad has if s/he disagrees with the other authors' decision? Or what the committee should do if the postgrad refuses to complete the copyright handover form for the journal, or does not approve the final version. The ICMJE Uniform Requirements simply state that the order of listing should be agreed between authors (so this doesn't help)—are there any other guidelines that might help?

Liz Wager
Sideview
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This is an issue that needs some discussion, at least in the field of psychology. I understand that the scenario you describe happens with some frequency in my discipline, particularly in applied areas, such as clinical psychology. For example, a student works on a dissertation that is an extension of the mentor’s research. There is an explicit or implicit agreement that once the dissertation is completed, it is repackaged and submitted as an article(s) to a journal. Because the refereeing process can take a long time, often the student has graduated and moved away by the time the mentor receives the revisions from the reviewers. Unfortunately, as most of these students’ primary interest is to be practitioners and not scientists, they sometimes neglect to follow up on their original agreement. In too many cases, they have even come to hate the dissertation project itself and once they fulfill all of the requirements and graduate from the institution they move and do not keep in touch with their mentor.

As you point out in your scenario, there are cases where the submitted manuscript requires considerable work in order to be published and the mentor ends up doing that work. In some such instances, and depending on the amount of work done, if general accepted guidelines of authorship are to be followed, it would be legitimate to switch primary authorship to the mentor. However, here in the United States, the American Psychological Association has some fairly strict guidelines concerning authorship of thesis work (see below) and, for fear of losing the highly coveted APA accreditation, mentors in such cases either maintain the student as senior author in spite of a tremendous amount of additional work required to publish the thesis as a journal article or simply abandon the project altogether. Maintaining the student as senior author is clearly not fair to the mentor and any other co-authors. Abandoning the project altogether does a disservice to science and raises some potential ethical issues, such as having wasted study participants’ time and effort, or even having placed them at some level of (ultimately unnecessary) risk. It is also not uncommon to assure study participants that the results of the study are expected to make a significant contribution to the discipline (some statement about the latter is often included in study consent forms). Obviously, no such contribution is possible if the study is never published.

In sum, I think the researchers in question need to first check their institutions’ and their professional associations’ guidelines on student authorship. Assuming that there are no concrete guidelines on the subject, then there needs to be an honest reassessment of all of the contributions made by each of the authors. Ideally, an objective, outside observer and one who has some knowledge of authorship issues and is also immune from any undue influence from the group should be included in the discussion. In that context, I trust that the right decision will be made regarding the ultimate authorship status of the student.

Below are some relevant student authorship guidelines from various professional associations though mostly from the social sciences. For what it’s worth, I think that the Australian Psychological Limited guidelines are the most sensible.

Your research group may be interested in reviewing my colleague Karl Wuensch’s page on authorship: http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/thauth.htm  and my faculty-student research contract: http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/research%20contract.html

Miguel Roig

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APA

Except under exceptional circumstances, a student is listed as principal author on any multiple-authored article that is substantially based on the student's doctoral dissertation. Faculty advisors discuss publication credit with students as early as feasible and throughout the research and publication process as appropriate.

Canadian Psychological Association

Take credit only for the work and ideas that they have actually done or generated, and give credit for work done or ideas contributed by others (including students), in proportion to their contribution.

Australian Psychological Limited

Take credit only for the work and ideas that they have actually done or generated, and give credit for work done or ideas contributed by others (including students), in proportion to their contribution.

A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored article that is substantially based on the student’s dissertation or thesis. The student’s supervisor will usually be second author to such a publication. If the student does not submit a manuscript for publication in a reasonable period of time after completion of the research (“reasonable period” should be determined by the Psychology Academic Organisational Unit (AOU) Head), then the supervisor may publish the research and assume primary authorship and the student must be listed as an author.

American Political Science Association

Teachers cannot represent themselves as authors of independent student research; and research assistance, paid or unpaid, requires full acknowledgement.

As advisers, faculty members are not entitled to claim joint authorship with a student of a thesis or dissertation.

American Sociological Association

A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.
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As we discuss this complex issue, it is also important to remember that students' dissertation work can solely depend of extant (existing) data sets that may or may not have been generated from the supervisor’s previous work. Before I came to the United States, I did not know that dissertations can be completed without even collecting data oneself.

Adamson Muula
Malawi Medical Journal
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One way to express my response is that they should do nothing. This is a student's project and if the student chooses to abandon it, that is the end of the story. In my institution, a thesis committee would rarely qualify for authorship so even if the student said, in effect, do what you will with my thesis, I find it difficult to accept that it would be appropriate for the committee to proceed. The obvious exception to this would be when all such matters were discussed at the outset. The question Liz is posing is not a question of what order should authors be listed but who owns the work and who deserves authorship. It may well be that different customs prevail in other disciplines, especially those where students and postdocs are taken on as extension of an investigator's own work, but even there I would have difficulty accepting that a committee is entitled to authorship using the criteria most WAME members seem to accept.

I. B. Pless
Editor, Injury Prevention
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This is always tough, but it is not specific for grad students. Faculty leave work undone, change jobs, etc, and the same issues arise. But in the end, the list of authors published in the journal should follow the ICMJE guidelines, regardless of what the original intentions of the investigators were. This is best avoided by having an explicit discussion with students and faculty at the beginning of a project. I try to have the following discussion at the beginning of a project with a student, fellow, or faculty mentee working with me: "If you complete the work and submit a manuscript and do the work to get it published (turn in revisions, galleys, etc), then you will be first author. If you fail to complete the work, someone else (likely me) will complete it and supplant you as first author. This latter scenario is not my choice, but we have an ethical obligation to the subjects and a professional obligation to our coinvestigators to publish the work." Twice, reluctantly, I have become first author on a fellow’s paper when the fellow failed to complete it. I have also twice disobeyed this rule and left the fellow on as first author when there were extenuating circumstances (in one case, she delivered a baby before she could complete a revision of the manuscript).

Bill Tierney
Co-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of General Internal Medicine
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This is a nice, sensible way to handle this problem.

Even so, I think it's important for any change in authorship or order of authorship that the editor get a statement signed by all concerned attesting to the change. This avoids the potential problem of disgruntled authors claiming that they were removed without their knowledge from a paper they wrote, or that the order of authorship was changed without their consent. If the authors can't agree, it's their job or their institution's job to work it out. If an author can't be contacted (dropped off the face of the earth), then at least a good-faith effort should be made and so noted in the re-submission letter, subject to the editor's review and approval of the process.

Jay Siwek
Editor, American Family Physician
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I am living to witness similar situations like this where I have read 6 years since death of one researcher, papers that are being published of which he was among the investigating team. A query to one of the journals did not get any response, as probably no one wanted to disturb the status quo.

Adamson Muula
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Miguel summarizes many of the issues that psychologists have to deal with. APA does, however, use the word 'normally' (or something similar) in talking about work deriving from a thesis or dissertation. Should revisions require substantial additional work requiring substantial new analyses or (as sometimes occurs) additional data collection, this changes the situation to one where I think reconsideration of authors can be in order.

However, author agreement seems critical here. If the author/former student wants to make the revisions, they should definitely have the right to do so and always retain authorship. If the first author declines to make small revisions, this sounds like the reasonable responsibility of second and subsequent authors to me. If we're talking about major reanalysis or writing or new data collection, this sounds like a fundamentally distinct piece of work and order of authorship should be reconsidered. Other journals (not mine or any I've published in) lay out what each author did. I have been involved in papers where we put such details about equal contributions, work deriving and not deriving from dissertations, etc in the author footnote.
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In this dilemma of order can be sorted out by mentioning the researcher (who has left the institute after getting a degree) as first author and next the name of the mentor should be given. However, the researcher or student should be contacted for his consent and if he or she is not traceable then a footnote should be to this effect.

I have a question. One person has sent me some data and methods of a study and requests me to make a full paper out of it, and he proposes to publish the same in some journal and assures me to include my name in that paper as co-author. Will it be a case of plagiarism or say unethical? Please guide me.

Sadhu Charan Panda
Editor,Journal of Community Medicine
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Having read all that has been written about the subject, I see that Bill has narrowed it down. It is all a matter of agreement, as it is shared property and no one has the right to change the shares of property (making himself first) no matter how much he has generously donated to the project. He must obtain written consent from the other authors (grad. student).

In my faculty, it is common to find students’ names first or the supervisor’s name first. As long as they are not complaining I am happy with it.

In one incident when the supervisor was gunned down, the student still faithfully submitted the article with the supervisor’s name first in spite of his absence.

It is all a matter of agreement.

Akram Al-Huwaizi
Editor, Iraqi Orthodontic Journal
Exec. Editor, Iraqi Dental Journal