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
Structured, moderator-led open forum
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.
Testing the premise
The survey, cases, and conjectures would not function as separate parts of the meeting. They would work together as a repeated discussion structure.
A short anonymous survey would go to all stakeholder groups before the meeting, using a common core with role-specific branching. Case-specific results would be held back and revealed during the corresponding discussion rather than presented all at once.
The question for the forum is why: ambiguity, incentives, hierarchy, habit, different ideas about contribution, or something else.
Discussion module 1 Credit or accountability?
Case · The invited expert
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.
Conjecture: Authorship is often treated primarily as credit rather than accountability.
Survey signal: Have you ever been invited to join a paper when you felt your contribution might not justify authorship? Have you ever accepted authorship despite that uncertainty?
- Author, not author, or depends?
- Does critical review create a sufficient contribution?
- Does the answer change if the invited expert materially changes the interpretation?
- Why was the invitation extended in the first place?
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 provide access to patients, data, or specimens, and may have contributed substantial enrollment, but had limited involvement in study design, analysis, interpretation, or manuscript development.
Conjecture: Scientific culture and collaborative expectations can shape authorship beyond direct intellectual contribution.
Survey signal: Which contributions do you believe warrant authorship? How often do clinical care, patient accrual, access to data or specimens, seniority, mentorship, reciprocity, or prior collaboration influence who is included?
- Which of these contributions should count toward authorship, and which should be recognized another way?
- Should clinically important contributors be offered an opportunity to make the additional contributions required for authorship?
- Does the answer differ for a clinical trial, retrospective study, registry, or translational project?
Discussion module 3 Same work, different perspective
Case · The less-visible 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.
Conjecture: Different stakeholders may judge the same contribution differently.
Survey signal: Do academic investigators, editors, industry/publication colleagues, writers, and methodologists differ in what they consider sufficient for authorship? Have you seen a substantive contributor omitted because of role, affiliation, or perceived optics?
- When does concern about appearance create ghost authorship?
- Are industry contributors evaluated by the same standards as academic contributors?
- Which contributions tend to become more or less visible depending on who performs them?
Discussion module 4 Where is the 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, and transparency alone may not resolve genuine ambiguity.
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 shape the questions or recommendations across rounds?
- 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?
To keep the discussion moving, one or two participants could be told in advance that they may be asked to react first to a particular case. They would not give presentations; their role would simply be to help open the discussion before it moves to the broader group.
Proposed 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 Act II.
Act II · approximately 50 minutes Test It in Practice
15–27 min Module 1 · Credit or accountability?
The invited expert. Case → live vote → related survey result → discussion.
27–39 min Module 2 · What counts as contribution?
The clinically involved investigator. Case → live vote → related survey result → discussion.
39–51 min Module 3 · Same work, different perspective
The less-visible contributor. Case → live vote → stakeholder-specific survey result → discussion.
51–65 min Module 4 · Where is the gray zone?
The Delphi survey. Case → live vote → related survey result → discussion.
Act III · approximately 25 minutes What Survives?
65–77 min Conjectures and refutations
Return to the working conjectures after hearing the cases and the room. Which survive? Which need to be revised? Which were wrong?
77–86 min What should change?
Prospective authorship discussions, contribution tracking, recognition of important non-author contributions, late invitations, declining authorship, and the responsibilities of lead authors, journals, sponsors, and institutions.
86–90 min Closing question
What is one thing we should do differently after this conversation?
Additional cases we may draw from
The meeting will probably only have time for 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 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.