A: There are some guidelines you can use to answer tricky questions about authorship. Many journals have adopted the uniform requirements developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which you can find on their website. The first step is to recognize who meets the requirements for authorship, and who may be considered simply a contributor. The 3 criteria that the ICMJE requires for authorship are:

1) substantial contribution to project conception and design; data acquisition, or data analysis and interpretation
2) drafting and/or revising the article for intellectual content
3) final approval of the version to be published

The ICMJE also states that supervision, data collection, or acquisition of funding alone does not meet the requirements for being an author. In your case, then, it looks as if you and your mentor should be included as authors. You may want to include your data collectors and supervisor in the acknowledgements section of your paper.

A: Multi-center, collaborative projects have made the matter of authorship much more complex. Some teams rely on Likert scales to determine the quality and the quantity of each person's contribution. Others simply list authors in order of rank from senior to student, or they list according to the order of the study protocol.

Research groups present unique difficulties when deciding on authorship. In a research group consisting of hundreds of people (e.g. The Women's Health Initiative), it can be difficult to know who is responsible for what aspects of the paper. My recommendation is to list as authors only those people who meet all three criteria, and include the rest in the acknowledgments. If you decide to use the name of the research group as the author, then you need to designate the corresponding author either in the byline itself, or in the affiliation footnote.

The best advice I can give is for the team to establish authorship rules in the beginning of the study, so that everyone is clear what the requirements are. This should minimize awkward encounters when it comes time to publish the results.

A: Large pharmaceutical trials present an added complication because manuscript authors are generally selected by the clinical trial sponsor, who may believe that the reputation of one author is more important than another and wish to select the researcher who is best known in the field. More recently, companies are determining order of authorship by pragmatic criteria such as the number of subjects recruited, the order in which PIs complete recruitment, etc. In the interest of transparency, a growing number of journals print not only research articles and the order of authorship, but also the specific contributions each author has made to a manuscript. This practice was developed by medical editors to counter unethical and misleading authorship practices.

A: Unfortunately, misrepresentation of authorship is widespread, and people do it for a variety of reasons. Early career faculty may include senior faculty as authors to better their chances of getting published, getting tenure, obtaining funding, or getting a raise. It is never ethical. An evaluation of authorship in The Lancet revealed that 44% of people listed as authors did not meet even very liberally-interpreted criteria (Yank & Rennie, 1999). A similar study found that between 20% and 50% of authors in medical journals did not meet all three criteria, and another study of postdoctoral research fellows stated that 32% would misrepresent authorship if it would help them to get published (Bates, Anic, Marusic, & Marusic, 2004).

Dishonesty regarding authorship can damage the reputation of the scientific community and undermine public trust. Journal editors, reviewers, authors, research organizations, and policymakers are making efforts to establish quality assurance practices that will prevent or at least discourage unethical publication practices. While the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), by intention, does not oversee this area, you can refer to their website for up-to-date advisories about dealing with authorship. In 2006, they chose authorship as a "Point for Discussion," which included this quote:

Authorship of a scientific report is a responsibility as well as a privilege. It implies that a person has contributed essentially and substantially to the study and is able and willing to defend the work publicly. This does not mean that each author participated in all parts of the study, but it does mean that all authors have familiarized themselves with the general principles of all aspects of the study.
(Institute of Medicine, 1989, p. 34)