Society of Cutaneous Oncology · Proposed Meeting · Fall 2026
The Art of Authorship
When Guidelines Meet the Real World — a proposed 90-minute, multi-stakeholder Research Forum on how authorship decisions are actually made, why established standards are inconsistently applied, and what investigators, editors, industry colleagues, and publication professionals can learn from one another.
Meeting concept
Scientific authorship carries enormous value. It confers academic credit, signals expertise, influences promotion and reputation, and places an individual publicly alongside a body of scientific work. It also carries something less visible but equally important: responsibility and accountability.
Formal authorship standards are not difficult to find. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) provides explicit criteria for authorship, and organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) have developed guidance around ghost, guest, gift, and disputed authorship. Yet anyone who has participated in collaborative research knows that the real-world process of deciding who appears on a paper can be considerably more complicated.
Investigators may be invited onto abstracts after the analysis is substantially complete. Patient enrollment, trial leadership, mentorship, seniority, institutional hierarchy, scientific reputation, access to specimens or data, industry relationships, and collaborative politics may influence authorship decisions. At the same time, statisticians, writers, industry scientists, junior investigators, or other contributors may perform substantial intellectual work without receiving authorship or transparent recognition.
If the rules are relatively clear, why does authorship in the real world so often look different?
This proposed Research Forum would move beyond another review of authorship guidelines. Instead, it would examine the gap between standards and practice: how authorship decisions are actually made, which pressures shape them, where legitimate ambiguity exists, how different stakeholders see the same situation, and whether our current systems adequately align credit with contribution and accountability.
Format
Case-based, moderator-led conversation
Duration
90 minutes
Perspectives
Academia · Editors · Industry · Publication professionals
Our premise
The central premise is deliberately not that one group is responsible for inappropriate authorship. Authorship decisions emerge from an ecosystem: investigators, sponsors, editors, institutions, publication teams, statisticians, writers, mentors, trainees, and collaborative groups may each operate under different expectations and incentives.
The forum would therefore ask participants to examine authorship as a system-level problem of scientific culture, while preserving room for individual responsibility. The goal is not to identify villains. It is to make the process visible.
Building on prior work
This conversation does not begin with SoCO. Important prior work has established both the ethical framework and the persistence of real-world ambiguity. Rather than claiming novelty for the topic itself, the proposed forum would bring that scholarship into a live conversation within the cutaneous oncology community.
ICMJE authorship criteria. The current recommendations frame authorship as both credit and accountability and state that authors should satisfy four criteria spanning substantive contribution, critical participation in the manuscript, final approval, and accountability for the work. ICMJE: Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors.
Medical Publishing Insights and Practices (MPIP) Initiative. In 2014, Marušić and colleagues reported a survey of 498 clinical investigators, journal editors, publication professionals, and medical writers who adjudicated seven challenging real-world authorship scenarios. The work led to a Five-Step Authorship Framework for industry-sponsored clinical-trial publications. BMC Medicine 2014;12:197.
COPE authorship guidance. COPE has developed resources addressing authorship disputes and the recognition of potential ghost, guest, or gift authorship. COPE Discussion Document: Authorship.
CRediT contributorship taxonomy. The CRediT taxonomy provides 14 standardized contributor roles that can make individual contributions more transparent, while remaining conceptually distinct from the decision of who qualifies for authorship. Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).
Conjectures to examine — and potentially refute
The discussion would begin with a series of working conjectures rather than predetermined conclusions. Panelists and the audience would be explicitly invited 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 create legitimate gray zones that deserve careful discussion.
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.
Whose perspective belongs in the room?
The session would intentionally avoid centering only the academic investigator. Many participants wear more than one of these hats, and that overlap is itself useful.
Academic investigators
How do patient accrual, seniority, mentorship, consortium expectations, promotion incentives, and collaborative relationships 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?
A survey before the forum
A short anonymous pre-meeting survey could turn the session from a purely theoretical discussion into an examination of what our community actually experiences.
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? Disagreement would not be a failure of the session. It may be the most informative result.
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?
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?
Goals of the forum
Make the invisible visible
Expose how authorship decisions are actually made, including the informal pressures and assumptions that rarely appear in contribution statements.
Create shared vocabulary
Distinguish ghost authorship from guest, gift, and honorary authorship and separate authorship qualification from broader contributorship.
Compare perspectives
Understand where academic, editorial, industry, and publication-professional viewpoints converge — and where they do not.
Move toward better practice
Identify pragmatic approaches that improve transparency, prospectively align expectations, and make it easier to give appropriate credit without diluting accountability.
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.
Importantly, the perspective itself could reflect the thesis of the meeting by involving meaningful intellectual participation from academic investigators, editors, industry/publication colleagues, and other relevant contributors rather than defaulting to a conventional single-community author group.
The goal is not to decide who is good at following the rules. The goal is to understand why thoughtful people operating in the same scientific ecosystem can arrive at very different authorship practices — and what we should do about it.
Working title
The Art of Authorship: When Guidelines Meet the Real World
Alternative subtitle retained for discussion: Who Gets on the Paper — and Why?