Retraction Watch

The “innocence” of co-authors is a difficult and problematic concept. Clearly, co-authorship confers many rewards – citations, acknowledgments, H-(and other) indexes, expanding lists of publications. It also confers responsibilities. The ICMJE “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals” (often referred to as the Vancouver Protocols) state this clearly:

“Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications. Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work.”

Since the first edition in 1979, there have been statements voicing the expectation that those named as authors take responsibility for the content of papers bearing their names. Consistently, it has recommended that a “covering letter should contain a statement that the manuscript has been seen and approved by all authors”. By 1988, this had firmed up into the form of words that underlie Authorship Criteria in most national and international statements today:

“All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content.”

For large-scale multi-centre projects, a caveat was added in about 1999:
“Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. … Some journals now also request that one or more authors, referred to as “guarantors,” be identified as the persons who take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article, and publish that information.”

Nevertheless, it was reasserted that those named as authors must have met all the criteria for authorship and have given “final approval of the version to be published.” By 2013, the provision for assigning overall responsibility to a single ‘guarantor’ (even in large multi-centre, multi-group studies) had been abandoned and a stronger statement added as a 4th criterion for authorship:

“4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investi- gated and resolved.
In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co- authors.
All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged—see Section II.A.3 below. These authorship criteria are intended to reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take responsibility for the work.”

It must be really tough if you have been “deceived” by one of your colleagues into believing that some data or other images, or key calculations were accurate when they were not but it seems to me that one of the guarantees on which we depend when we read co-authored papers is that integrity of those key elements in which scientific discoveries are based have been validated, subjected to at least some due diligence by those who have signed their names to the paper.

I think that when co-authors understand the gravity of the consequences of not doing that, we might just have fewer cases of research misconduct appearing in the literature. I hope.

Great question, I think they should. I would retract at least half of all scientific papers published, as they are not reproducible and flawed.