The Art of Authorship
Society of Cutaneous Oncology · Proposed Meeting · Fall 2026
The Art of Authorship
Who Gets on the Paper?
Guidelines, Culture, and the Reality of Scientific Publishing
A proposed 90-minute, multi-stakeholder Research Forum on how authorship decisions are actually made — and why real-world practice can diverge from established standards.
Meeting concept
Scientific authorship carries both credit and accountability. It affects promotion and reputation, and puts an author’s name — and responsibility — on the work.
The standards are clear. The decisions often are not. In practice, authorship may reflect many things beyond direct intellectual contribution: enrolling or caring for patients, providing access to data or specimens, trial or program leadership, mentorship, seniority, institutional hierarchy, reputation, or reciprocity from prior collaborations. In retrospective and other clinical research, even proximity to the patients or dataset can influence who is included. At the same time, substantial contributors may not always receive appropriate recognition.
If the rules are relatively clear, why does authorship in the real world so often look different?
This forum would focus on that gap between standards and practice: how authorship decisions are actually made, what pressures shape them, where legitimate ambiguity exists, and how different stakeholders see the same problem.
Format
Case-based, moderator-led conversation
Duration
90 minutes
Perspectives
Academia · Editors · Industry · Publication professionals
Perspectives around the table
The same authorship decision can look very different to an investigator, editor, industry colleague, or publication professional. Many participants wear more than one of these hats — and that overlap is itself useful.
Academic investigators
How do clinical care, access to patients or data, study design, patient accrual, mentorship, seniority, institutional roles, consortium expectations, promotion incentives, reciprocity, and prior collaborations shape decisions to accept, decline, include, or exclude authors?
Industry & publication colleagues
How are external authors identified? When are authorship discussions initiated? How are contributions tracked? What happens when a proposed author does not meet criteria — or when an industry contributor does substantial work but is omitted?
Journal editors
What authorship problems actually reach editors? What raises concern? How useful are contribution statements? What can a journal reasonably police, and where does editorial responsibility end?
Writers, statisticians & methodologists
Which forms of intellectual, analytic, and writing contribution are routinely visible — and which may be undervalued, misunderstood, or rendered invisible by the traditional byline?
Our premise
These decisions are rarely made by one person or one group. Investigators, sponsors, editors, institutions, publication teams, statisticians, writers, mentors, and trainees all shape the process, often under different incentives. The point is to understand those pressures without losing sight of individual responsibility.
Goals of the forum
Unpack authorship decisions
Examine how authorship decisions are actually made — including the informal pressures, expectations, and assumptions that rarely appear in contribution statements.
Compare perspectives
Identify where investigators, editors, industry colleagues, and publication professionals agree — and where they see the same authorship problem differently.
Interrogate the gap
Ask why authorship practice diverges from the rules: ambiguity, incentives, hierarchy, habit — or something else.
Move toward better practice
Identify pragmatic ways to better align contribution, credit, transparency, and accountability across modern scientific collaborations.
Conjectures to examine — and potentially refute
We would begin with working conjectures, not predetermined conclusions — and invite the panel and audience to challenge them.
The central problem in 2026 may be less about lack of guidance and more about inconsistent implementation.
If authorship were viewed first as public responsibility for a scientific work, some common practices might look different.
Hierarchy, prestige, promotion, reciprocity, institutional expectations, collaborative politics, and perceived publication advantage may all influence the byline.
Large multicenter trials, consortium science, specialized analytic teams, professional medical writing, and academic–industry collaborations can make the line between contribution and authorship genuinely difficult to draw.
An invitation that feels inappropriate to an investigator may arise from a publication process or expectation that looks very different from the industry, editorial, or consortium perspective.
Contribution statements and taxonomies can document what people did; they may not, by themselves, correct incentives or normalize difficult decisions such as declining authorship.
A survey before the forum
A short anonymous survey would let us start with our community’s actual experience rather than our assumptions.
Rather than three entirely separate instruments, the survey could use a common core with role-specific branching. Respondents could select every role they occupy; investigators who are also editors, for example, could answer both pathways.
Common core What have you actually experienced?
- Have you ever been invited to join an abstract or manuscript when you felt your contribution may not justify authorship?
- Have you ever accepted authorship despite uncertainty about whether you met authorship criteria?
- Have you ever declined authorship because you believed your contribution was insufficient?
- Have you ever felt pressure to include or exclude an author for reasons not primarily related to scientific contribution?
- When are authorship expectations typically discussed: before the work begins, during the project, after analysis, or near submission?
- How confident are you that common authorship practices in your environment align with formal guidance?
Academic branch
Accrual · hierarchy · mentorship · reciprocity · consortium expectations
Industry branch
Author selection · publication planning · contribution tracking · sponsor roles
Editorial branch
Warning signs · contribution statements · disputes · editorial limits
Selected survey findings could be revealed during the meeting before the panel discusses the corresponding cases. The survey is not intended to identify wrongdoing; it is intended to expose patterns, disagreements, and areas where assumptions differ across stakeholders.
Proposed format
The session would be a conversation rather than a sequence of formal presentations. A few orienting slides could establish the authorship framework and summarize prior work, but most of the 90 minutes would consist of anonymous survey findings, case vignettes, audience polling, moderator questions, and direct discussion among panelists.
The same case should often be put to multiple people in the room: What does the investigator see? What does industry see? What does the editor see? What does the audience think? The disagreements may be the most useful part.
Proposed 90-minute agenda
Act I · approximately 20 minutes The Rules — and the Reality
0–6 min Opening and premise
Authorship as credit and accountability. Why revisit a problem for which guidelines already exist?
6–12 min The framework in one slide
ICMJE, COPE, contributorship, and the distinction between ghost authorship and guest/gift/honorary authorship. Enough background to create a common vocabulary — no ethics lecture.
12–20 min What does our community report?
Selected results from the pre-meeting survey, including common experiences and differences across stakeholder groups.
Act II · approximately 45 minutes What Actually Happens?
20–45 min Author or not? The cases
A rapid series of anonymized real-world scenarios. Audience poll first; panel discussion second. The goal is to make tacit authorship norms explicit.
45–65 min Same case, different chair
Investigators, editors, industry colleagues, and publication professionals explain how the same scenarios look from where they sit — including the pressures, constraints, and responsibilities that may be invisible to other groups.
Act III · approximately 25 minutes Conjectures, Refutations & What We Do Next
65–78 min Why does the gap persist?
Return to the forum's conjectures. Which survive? Which were wrong? Which mechanisms appear most important: ambiguity, culture, incentives, hierarchy, process, or accountability?
78–86 min Can we do better?
Prospective authorship discussions, contribution tracking, meaningful contributorship statements, normalization of declining authorship, responsibilities of lead and corresponding authors, and the appropriate role of journals and sponsors.
86–90 min Closing question
What would a healthier authorship culture look like — and what is one practice each stakeholder group could change tomorrow?
Illustrative case bank
1 · The invited expert
A recognized disease expert receives a nearly completed abstract from a collaborative group or sponsor and is invited to review it and join the author list. The expert did not participate in study design, conduct, analysis, or the initial interpretation of results.
- Does critical review now create a sufficient contribution?
- Does the answer change if the expert materially alters the interpretation?
- What responsibility does the invited individual have to decline?
- Why was the invitation extended in the first place?
2 · The enrolling investigator
A site investigator enrolled a substantial number of patients onto a multicenter trial but had no role in study design, analysis, or manuscript planning.
- Is accrual alone sufficient?
- Should high-enrolling investigators be offered an opportunity to make the additional contributions required for authorship?
- How should multicenter trials recognize clinically important contributions that do not ultimately meet authorship criteria?
3 · The senior leader
A department chair, laboratory leader, or senior mentor provided infrastructure, funding, mentorship, or general oversight but did not participate directly in the specific project.
- Where does legitimate supervision end and honorary authorship begin?
- How much do hierarchy and fear of professional friction shape the decision?
4 · The invisible industry contributor
An industry scientist helped design the study, participated in analytic decisions, and materially shaped interpretation, but there is pressure to keep the external-facing author list investigator-heavy.
- When does concern about appearance create ghost authorship?
- Are industry contributors evaluated by the same authorship standards as academic contributors?
5 · The statistician
A statistician performs the analysis, challenges the prespecified approach, proposes additional analyses, and materially changes the interpretation of the work.
- Is the contribution technical, intellectual, or both?
- How often are analytic contributions undervalued because they occur outside the traditional clinical hierarchy?
6 · The medical writer
A professional medical writer develops a substantial first draft under direction of the scientific team and iteratively helps organize the argument.
- When is writing assistance appropriately acknowledged, and when might the contribution cross into authorship?
- Does transparent acknowledgment solve the ethical concern?
7 · The Delphi panel
A Delphi study asks a group of experts to participate in multiple survey rounds and help establish consensus recommendations. A smaller investigator group designed the study, developed the survey, analyzed and interpreted the results, and drafted the manuscript.
- Does participation in the Delphi process itself warrant authorship?
- Should every expert who completed the survey be an author, or only those who also contributed to study design, interpretation, and manuscript development?
- Does the answer change if panelists substantially shape the questions or recommendations across rounds?
- How should meaningful participation that falls short of authorship be recognized?
Building on prior work
There is already substantial work on authorship standards and on the difficult cases that arise in practice. The value for SoCO is to bring that work into our own community and ask what these problems look like today.
ICMJE authorship criteria. Authorship is framed around substantive contribution, participation in the manuscript, final approval, and accountability. ICMJE: Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors.
Medical Publishing Insights and Practices (MPIP) Initiative. A 2014 survey of 498 investigators, editors, publication professionals, and medical writers used seven gray-zone scenarios to examine how stakeholders make authorship decisions. BMC Medicine 2014;12:197.
COPE authorship guidance. COPE provides practical guidance on authorship disputes and potential ghost, guest, or gift authorship. COPE Discussion Document: Authorship.
CRediT contributorship taxonomy. CRediT defines 14 contributor roles to make individual contributions more transparent, while remaining distinct from authorship qualification. Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).
Moderator question bank
For investigators
- When was the last time you were explicitly told, before a project began, what would qualify someone for authorship?
- Have we normalized authorship as a reward for participation rather than a statement of contribution and accountability?
- How difficult is it in practice to decline authorship from a senior colleague, collaborator, sponsor, or consortium?
- Do early-career investigators experience these pressures differently from established investigators?
- What kinds of contribution are systematically overvalued or undervalued in academic medicine?
For industry & publication colleagues
- When in the life of a trial is the publication author group typically assembled?
- What practical criteria are used to identify external authors beyond the formal authorship standard?
- How are contributions prospectively tracked, and who has authority to challenge a proposed author?
- What happens when an invited investigator has not yet made a sufficient contribution?
- Are there circumstances in which substantive industry contributions are intentionally made less visible because of perceived optics?
- Which academic assumptions about industry publication practice are simply wrong?
For editors
- How often do you suspect that a byline does not accurately reflect the work behind the paper?
- What patterns raise concern for guest, gift, or ghost authorship?
- Do contributorship statements meaningfully help, or can they become a retrospective rationalization of an already-decided author list?
- When should an editor challenge an author list?
- What is realistically within the journal's responsibility, and what belongs to institutions and author groups?
- Are current authorship criteria fit for large, highly collaborative modern science?
For everyone
- Is authorship primarily a mechanism of credit, accountability, or both?
- If a person can describe what they contributed but cannot defend the paper's conclusions, should they be an author?
- If everyone technically satisfies the criteria only after being invited to review a finished manuscript, have the criteria actually done their job?
- What should happen to legitimate contributors whose work is important but insufficient for authorship?
- Should declining inappropriate authorship be recognized as part of responsible scientific conduct?
- What would you change about the culture rather than the guideline?
Potential scholarly output
The forum could also serve as the foundation for a multi-stakeholder perspective on authorship in contemporary oncology. The aim would not be to publish another generic summary of existing criteria. Rather, the perspective could synthesize:
- the existing authorship framework and prior scholarship;
- contemporary experiences captured through the SoCO survey;
- points of agreement and disagreement exposed during the Research Forum;
- the pressures unique to modern academic–industry and multicenter collaborative research; and
- practical principles for aligning contribution, credit, transparency, and accountability.
The paper should probably follow the same principle it argues for: authorship based on meaningful contribution across the groups represented in the forum.
The question is less who is getting authorship “right” or “wrong” than why these decisions vary so much in practice — and whether we can do better.