Author Order and Authorship Criteria (ICMJE)

The four ICMJE criteria

• Substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data.
• Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content.
• Final approval of the version to be published.
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work and for the integrity of any part of it.

Someone who only provided funding, only supplied data, or merely headed the department is not an author under this rule — but should be named in the Acknowledgements.

What the order of names signals

There is no single global rule and conventions differ by field, but in most experimental disciplines the order is read like this:

Honorary and ghost authorship

“Honorary authorship” means adding a name that did no work; “ghost authorship” means omitting someone who actually wrote the paper. COPE treats both as research misconduct, and the outcome can be a retraction — which stays on the record permanently.

So how is research collaboration done properly?

Through a real, documented contribution. If someone is to join a study, they need a defined role — data analysis, literature review, lab work, scientific writing — and that role must be recorded. That is the rule at ApplyDesk too: every authorship position carries a recorded role and scope of work and passes human review before publication. A position is never assigned without a real contribution.