Authorship guidelines

The iHuman Lab follows the NIH Guidelines for authorship in considering whether your contribution to a project merits authorship on the paper. If you have made a non-trivial contribution to a project but did not meet the requirements for authorship, you will instead receive a citation in the acknowledgments section of the paper.

Task

Review the NIH Guidelines for Authorship.

Note

Conference posters and abstracts generally have substantially less stringent authorship requirements than formal papers. The general rule of thumb for posters is that all project team members should be co-authors.

In general, you likely meet the requirements for authorship if you contributed in any of the following ways:

  1. Drafted the manuscript (this warrants first authorship)
  2. Came up with the idea or made other substantial intellectual contributions that meaningfully shaped the trajectory of the project
  3. Carried out an original experimental study (e.g., that you designed or implemented)
  4. Carried out non-trivial data analyses (e.g., more complicated than t-tests)
  5. Contributed novel tools or resources to the project that haven’t been published yet

You are unlikely to meet the requirements for authorship if your contributions are limited to the following:

  1. Running experimental participants for an already-designed and coded-up study
  2. Running trivial data analyses (e.g., t-tests or similar)
  3. Getting trained by one of the other project members on a project-related task
  4. Training another project member on a project-related task
  5. Sharing already-published tools or resources
  6. Editing or commenting on a draft of the manuscript

The final determination for who will be an author on each lab paper (and in what order) will be made by Hemanth, following open discussions with project team members.

Old projects

For projects that required significant lab resources (e.g., EEG studies or any other study requiring a great deal of time, money, or lab effort): Project “ownership” expires 3 years after data collection has ended (or whenever the original primary lead relinquishes their rights to the study, whichever comes first). At that point, I reserve the right to re-assign the project (or not) as needed to expedite publication. This policy is intended to avoid situations in which a dataset languishes for a long period of time while still giving publication priority to the original primary lead.