Authorship credits the people who made the work and makes them accountable for it. Peer Academics applies one standard across every discipline it publishes and does not treat authorship as a courtesy, a reward, or a bargaining position. This page says who may be listed, how contributions are recorded, and what happens if the list changes.
Who qualifies as an author
Following the criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, an author is a person who meets all four of the following conditions:
- substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of the data, sources, or materials;
- drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
- approval of the version submitted and of the version to be published;
- agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including for the integrity and accuracy of parts they did not personally carry out, and for ensuring that questions about any part are investigated and resolved.
Anyone who meets the first criterion must be given the chance to meet the others; you may not exclude a qualifying colleague by declining to show them the manuscript. Anyone meeting fewer than all four is a contributor, not an author, and belongs in the acknowledgments, with their permission. Funding a study, supplying data, materials, access, or laboratory space, holding a supervisory or departmental post, and general editorial or technical help do not by themselves qualify anyone as an author.
Order of authors and corresponding author
The order of names is decided by the authors themselves, by whatever convention their field uses, and agreed before submission. The journal neither dictates nor arbitrates it. One author acts as corresponding author and is responsible for:
- confirming, at submission, that every listed author meets the four criteria, has seen and approved the manuscript, and has agreed to its submission;
- ensuring that the author list, affiliations, ORCID iDs, and contributor statements are accurate and complete;
- all communication with the journal through review, revision, proofs, and after publication, and for passing that communication to the co-authors;
- answering questions about the work after publication, including requests for data, and for ensuring that any correction is made.
The corresponding author's email address is published with the article. A change of corresponding author during review requires the written agreement of all authors.
Contributor roles (CRediT)
Every submission records what each author actually did, using the CRediT taxonomy, in the Author contributions declaration described in Manuscript Structure. In the anonymous manuscript, use "Author 1", "Author 2"; the named version goes on the title page and is published with the article. The fourteen roles are: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; software; supervision; validation; visualization; writing — original draft; and writing — review and editing. An author may hold several roles and a role may be shared, but recording a role does not by itself make someone an author: the four criteria still apply.
Practices the journal does not accept
- Ghost authorship — omitting someone who meets the criteria, including a professional writer who drafted the text. Writing assistance must be disclosed and acknowledged, with who paid for it.
- Gift or honorary authorship — listing a head of department, supervisor, senior colleague, or collaborator who did not meet the criteria.
- Guest authorship — adding a well-known name to improve the manuscript's reception.
- Purchased or traded authorship — buying or selling a place on the author list, or obtaining authorship through a paper mill or any brokered manuscript service. This is treated as serious misconduct in every case.
- Fictitious authors — listing a person who does not exist, or someone unaware that they are listed.
Artificial intelligence cannot be an author
A large language model, chatbot, agent, or other software tool may not be listed as an author or co-author, in any position, and may not be named as the corresponding author. Authorship requires accountability, consent, and the capacity to approve a text and answer for it, none of which software can provide. Use of such tools is disclosed in the Declarations instead, and the authors remain responsible for every word of the result. See the Generative AI Policy.
Changing the author list after submission
The list submitted is treated as final. To add, remove, or reorder authors at any point after submission, the corresponding author must send to [email protected]:
- the reason for the change, and why the position was not correct at submission;
- written confirmation of agreement from every author on the original list and on the proposed list;
- where a person is being added or removed, that person's own written confirmation.
The handling editor decides whether to accept the change, and may refuse one that is unexplained or that arrives only after a favorable decision. Review is paused until the question is settled. After publication, a change is made only where the original list was demonstrably wrong, and is recorded in a published correction notice; the article is not edited silently.
Disputes
Peer Academics cannot determine who did what inside a research group and does not try to. If authors disagree about credit or order, the manuscript is held — not rejected, not published, not advanced — and the corresponding author is asked to settle it. If it is not settled within a reasonable period, the journal refers the matter to the authors' institution, acts on its finding, and may return the manuscript unpublished in the meantime. A dispute found after publication is handled under Publication Ethics and may lead to a correction or, where authorship was fabricated, a retraction. Undisclosed ghost, gift, guest, or purchased authorship found at any stage may lead to rejection, retraction, notification of the authors' institutions, and refusal of future submissions.
Group authorship
Where work is done by a named group or consortium, list the individuals who meet the four criteria as authors and name the group in the byline and in full in the acknowledgments. Everyone credited under a group name must be identifiable, and the corresponding author confirms that each has agreed. A group name cannot stand in for authors who qualify.