Article-based theses and co-authorship – general principles

Co-authorship and the order in which authors should be listed are not determined by unambiguous rules. VID recommends that the Vancouver rules be applied in the context of co-authorship in publications linked to article-based doctoral theses. In some cases, co-authorship issues may be a source of conflicts. It therefore makes sense to clarify relevant co-authorships and discuss the contributions to be made by each co-author at an early stage of the work on the thesis.

Criteria for co-authorship

The co-author role reveals little about the actual contribution of an author. Some journals therefore request information concerning the contribution that each co-author have made to the article before publication. This information is frequently published next to the article. If you are a PhD student at VID and intend to publish articles with co-authors and include them in a thesis, you are responsible for collecting information about the contributions made by each co-author (see below for more information about this issue).

There are very few traditional rules concerning co-authorship. The closest thing is the Vancouver Recommendations, which VID would like all employees to observe and which all PhD students must sign. The Vancouver Recommendations establish that three criteria must be met in order to merit co-authorship for a publication:

a) Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or development and analysis of the theoretical model, or data collection, or analysis and interpretation of data;

b) Drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content;

c) Final approval of the version to be published.

All three criteria (a, b and c) must be met to merit co-authorship. All co-authors must agree to be accountable for all aspects of the published work and for ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. A co-author must also be sufficiently familiar with the work underlying a publication to be able to identify the contributions of the other co-authors.

In some cases, a contributor may meet one, two or three of the above criteria, but not all four. In such cases, the Vancouver Recommendations state that the person in question shall be acknowledged for their contribution to the article, for example in the ‘acknowledgements’, but not included in the list of authors.

The journal is not responsible for checking that the Vancouver Recommendations have been complied with, this is the responsibility of the authors of the article.

If possible, each of the co-authors’ contributions and the names to be included in the list of authors should be agreed in advance, since this will help prevent conflicts during the work or the publication process. If PhD students co-publish with, for example, their supervisor, the sequence in which the authors will be listed must be clarified in advance. In some cases, the journals will have internal rules and guidelines regarding the list of authors to an article. It is therefore advisable to check whether this applies to the journal to which the article will be submitted.

Moreover, practices related to co-authorship vary between disciplines:

Author order

The order in which the co-authors are listed may occasionally give rise to conflicts. There are few applicable laws and rules in this area, and the way in which the co-authors are listed can vary from one discipline to another.

As a main rule, the person who has made the greatest contribution to the article should be listed as first author. In some disciplines, it is also common for the co-author who has made the second greatest contribution to be listed as the last author. If the first author is a PhD student, the last author tends to be the supervisor or group leader, but this is not a rule.

The Vancouver Recommendations give no instructions regarding who is entitled to be the last author or corresponding author. Therefore, the group of authors needs to agree on this among themselves.

When publishing an article written by multiple co-authors, one of them shall appear as corresponding author; in VID, this will normally be the first author. The corresponding author is the contact person for the journal and helps ensure that the peer reviewers receive answers to questions that arise during the review process.

Article-based PhD theses

An article-based thesis must contain at least three articles and an extended abstract. At least one of the articles must be published or be accepted for publishing in a recognized peer-reviewed and preferably international journal by the time of submission. The other articles must be accepted for publishing or be considered as ready for publishing. All articles must have been published or accepted for publication in academic, peer- reviewed channels, including articles in anthologies. For articles published in an academic anthologyedited by one or more VID staff members, the adjudication committee can request access to the peer review in its entirety. For further information, see Extended abstract in theses at VID – guidelines for article-based PhD theses.

The publications included in a PhD thesis must comply with research ethics rules and conventions for academic quality assurance of research.

Declaration of co-authorship shall help identify and assess the candidate’s academic performance in light of the requirements for a PhD degree. The declaration of co-authorship shall describe the work process and division of labour between the co-authors and specify their consent to using the article in the thesis. The candidate’s independent contribution must be identifiable.