Authorship
Authorship should be granted to any individual who makes sustained, intellectual contributions. A question to ask yourself regarding authorship is, “Could this paper have happened without this author?” Examples of sustained, intellectual contribution include:
- Designing and implementing data collection and editing the final manuscript
- Analyzing the data and ensuring that results are reported correctly
- Writing parts of the manuscript
All authors are expected to review the final research product before submission.
It is expected that the first author takes the lead on the project – no matter their status, this person has final say in decisions regarding analysis and writing.
Authorship arrangements should be discussed at the beginning of a project and revisited whenever there are updates to the expected contributions of collaborators. The order of authors should be decided at the beginning of the project and expectations for each author’s contributions should be clearly specified. In some cases, it may be useful to outline contingency plans. For example, if a student anticipates graduating before the project is done, expectations for their contributions after graduation should be specified and also expectations for changes in authorship if they’re unable to maintain engagement with the project. First authors are expected to retain primacy responsibility for the publication process even if they leave the lab.
The same general guidelines apply to conference presentations as well.
Authorship can also be documented using the CRediT system, and here’s a useful Shiny app for creating the necessary text for a document, including the papaja YAML.
Preprints and open access
Our lab is pro-open access (see our statement on Values). All publications should be made publicly available. It is our general preference to post preprints of manuscripts on PsyArXiv just before submitting our manuscripts to a journal and after every major revision of the paper. Be sure to link preprints to peer-reviewed journal publications after acceptance.