The Art of Authorship
Society of Cutaneous Oncology · Research Workshop · October 28, 2026 · 3:30–5:00 PM ET
The Art of Authorship
Who Gets on the Paper?
Guidelines, Culture, and the Reality of Scientific Publishing
A 90-minute, multi-stakeholder Research Workshop using cases, survey data, and open discussion to examine 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 workshop will 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
Structured, moderator-led Research Workshop
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.
Why bring this into the room?
Authorship guidance is not new. What is less common is talking openly about how these decisions are actually made among the people who work together — investigators, editors, industry colleagues, writers, statisticians, trainees, and others.
Many of our assumptions about authorship are learned through experience: from mentors, collaborators, institutions, companies, and the culture around us. Bringing those experiences into the open may do more than raise awareness. It can give people a shared language — and perhaps a little more confidence — to ask difficult questions, decline authorship that does not fit, recognize contributors who are being overlooked, and start these conversations earlier.
As research becomes increasingly multicenter, multidisciplinary, and intertwined with industry and publication teams, these decisions are only becoming more complicated.
Goals of the workshop
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.
Discussion architecture
The workshop would be organized around a small number of recurring authorship tensions rather than a catalogue of edge cases. For each module, one or two participants would be asked in advance to react first — ideally pairing an academic perspective with an industry, publication, or editorial perspective. They would not give presentations; their role would be to help open the discussion before it moves to the broader group.
The question for the workshop is why: ambiguity, incentives, hierarchy, habit, different ideas about contribution, or something else.
Discussion module 1 Credit, credibility, and the person who actually did the work
Case · The invited thought leader
A recognized disease expert receives a nearly completed abstract or manuscript 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. At the same time, another contributor — perhaps an industry scientist, CRO researcher, statistician, writer, or junior investigator — has done substantial day-to-day intellectual work but is positioned much less prominently on the byline.
Conjecture: Authorship can be shaped by credibility, visibility, affiliation, and professional incentives as well as by the work itself.
Survey signal: Have you ever been invited onto a nearly completed paper? Have you seen author order fail to reflect who actually led the analysis or writing? Does the identity or affiliation of the contributor change how the same work is valued?
- Can a late-invited expert legitimately earn authorship through substantive interpretation and revision, or is the invitation itself the problem?
- What does first authorship actually signify: analytic leadership, writing leadership, scientific leadership, public responsibility, or some combination?
- When does adding a recognized expert improve the science, and when does it primarily add legitimacy or visibility?
- Would the contributor who did much of the work be credited differently if they were an academic investigator rather than an industry scientist, CRO researcher, statistician, or writer?
- Does a transparent contributorship statement solve the problem if professional credit still follows the byline and author order?
Discussion module 2 What counts as contribution?
Case · The clinically involved investigator
An investigator cared for patients included in a retrospective or prospective study, helped identify or enroll participants, and provided access to data or specimens, but had limited involvement in study design, analysis, interpretation, or manuscript development.
Conjecture: Clinical contribution and intellectual contribution are not the same thing — but in collaborative research, the boundary between them can be genuinely difficult to draw.
An investigator may be essential to making the research possible — identifying and caring for patients, enrolling participants, providing data or specimens — without having shaped the study question, analysis, interpretation, or manuscript. The harder question is whether being essential to the research is the same as qualifying for authorship.
Survey signal: Which contributions should count toward authorship: patient care, patient identification or enrollment, providing access to data or specimens, site leadership, data acquisition, interpretation, manuscript development, or some combination?
- Which clinical contributions are sufficient for authorship, and which should be recognized another way?
- Does being essential to creating the dataset make someone an author?
- Should a clinically important collaborator be offered the opportunity to make the additional contributions needed for authorship?
- Does the answer change for a retrospective study, prospective cohort, registry, translational project, or clinical trial?
- Is there a meaningful distinction between contributing to the research and contributing to the paper?
- When you are leading a clinical project, how do you decide which investigators and clinical collaborators belong on the paper?
Discussion module 3 Who gets on the clinical trial paper?
Case · The multidisciplinary trial
A multicenter clinical trial depends on several kinds of expertise. Medical oncologists lead the regulatory work, protocol development, systemic therapy, and much of the trial infrastructure. Surgeons perform a key intervention and contribute clinically important expertise to the treatment paradigm, but successful systemic therapy may reduce the number of operations they ultimately perform. When the primary paper is assembled, the medical oncology investigators receive the most prominent authorship positions while an important surgical contributor is not included.
Conjecture: In clinical trials, the work that is easiest to count — protocol leadership, accrual, regulatory responsibility, or manuscript development — may not capture every contribution that is essential to the scientific question or treatment paradigm.
Survey signal: In a multicenter trial, what should drive inclusion and author order: protocol leadership, study conception, site leadership, accrual, performance of a key procedure, data interpretation, manuscript work, steering-committee role, or some combination?
- When should authorship expectations be established — protocol development, site activation, database lock, or manuscript planning?
- How should multidisciplinary contributions be valued when one component of the treatment strategy reduces the amount of another specialist's procedural work?
- Should site accrual be a threshold for authorship, a tiebreaker, or largely irrelevant once someone has made another substantive contribution?
- How should sponsors balance predefined publication plans with contributions that emerge during conduct, analysis, and interpretation?
- If 40 people legitimately qualify, is there any meaningful reason not to include 60 or 80 if they also qualify? What is gained or lost as the byline expands?
- Do considerations such as goodwill, future collaboration, representation across sites or specialties, and investigator engagement have a legitimate place in authorship decisions?
- At what point does a very large author list make individual accountability less meaningful — and is group authorship or a collaborator appendix a better solution?
Discussion module 4 Where is the genuine gray zone?
Case · The Delphi survey
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.
Conjecture: Not every difficult authorship decision represents misconduct. Some disagreements reflect genuinely different views of what constitutes sufficient intellectual contribution.
Survey signal: Does participation in a Delphi process itself warrant authorship? Should every participant be an author, or only those who also contribute to design, interpretation, and manuscript development?
- Does the answer change if participants substantially reshape the questions or recommendations across rounds?
- Is intellectual participation in consensus formation meaningfully different from simply supplying data?
- How should meaningful participation that falls short of authorship be recognized?
- Would a detailed contributorship statement settle the question, or simply make the disagreement more visible?
Share your experiences and perspectives on authorship before the workshop. The survey is open to the broader community; attendance at the workshop is not required. Estimated time: 7–9 minutes.
90-minute agenda
Act I · approximately 15 minutes Set the Table
0–5 min Opening and premise
Authorship as credit and accountability. If the standards are relatively clear, why does practice so often look different?
5–10 min The framework in one slide
ICMJE, COPE, contributorship, and the distinction between ghost authorship and guest/gift/honorary authorship. Enough shared vocabulary to participate — no ethics lecture.
10–15 min A first look at the survey
Two or three high-level findings about authorship experience and when authorship decisions are made. Case-specific results are held back for the corresponding discussions.
Act II · approximately 58 minutes Test It in Practice
15–29 min Module 1 · Credit, credibility, and who did the work
The invited thought leader and the less-visible lead contributor. Case → live vote → survey result → paired reactions → discussion.
29–43 min Module 2 · What counts as contribution?
The clinically involved investigator. Patient care, enrollment, data and specimens, clinical collaboration, and the boundary between enabling research and qualifying for authorship.
43–59 min Module 3 · Who gets on the clinical trial paper?
The multidisciplinary trial. Protocol leadership, accrual, specialty contribution, author-list size, goodwill, and accountability.
59–73 min Module 4 · Where is the genuine gray zone?
The Delphi survey. Participation, intellectual contribution, consensus formation, and alternative forms of recognition.
Act III · approximately 17 minutes What Survives?
73–81 min Editor reaction across the cases
What would raise concern? What can contributorship statements solve? When should a journal intervene, and when is the problem outside the journal's remit?
81–88 min What should change?
Prospective authorship discussions, contribution tracking, recognition of important non-author contributions, multidisciplinary trial planning, late invitations, declining authorship, and the responsibilities of lead authors, journals, sponsors, and institutions.
88–90 min Closing question
What is one thing we should do differently after this conversation?
Additional cases we may draw from
The workshop will focus on four core cases. These additional scenarios could be substituted based on survey findings or held in reserve if the discussion moves quickly.
Expand a case to see the scenario and discussion prompts.
Reserve case 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?
Reserve case 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?
Reserve case 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 concern?
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
These are prompts to draw from if a discussion needs a push, not a script for the meeting.
Expand a perspective to see possible moderator prompts.
Perspective 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?
Perspective 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?
Perspective 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?
Perspective 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 workshop 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 Workshop;
- 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 workshop.
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.