BUDS Lab Academic Authorship Guidelines

BUDS Lab Academic Authorship Guidelines based on SinBerBEST and UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment:

• These guidelines are based on the authorship guidelines from Nature and Science as well as conventional publication practices in the STEM fields.
  • The leading author should propose the authors’ list. All authors should agree to the list. To determine whom to include, Vancouver protocol (aka ICMJE) for authorship (same protocol is used in Science) shall be followed. A summary: Authorship credit should be based only on contributions to one or more of the following:
    • formulation of theory and prediction
    • contribution to conception and design
    • acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data
    • drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content. Honorary and ghost authorship are not allowed.
• Order of authorship should consider the relative contributions of authors to the intellectually most critical aspects of the work.
  • Contributions that give in decreasing importance should be:
    • the conception of the work being represented by the article, design of the work, analysis, and interpretation of data or other evidence presented in the article
    • followed by drafting the article or revising it for critically important content
    • and approving the final version of the article. The first author should have made major contributions in 1 and 2.
  • The following sequence of authors should represent progressively lesser contributions (with the exception of the last author -- see next point).
  • Typically, the last author will be the most senior member of the team (the one who is the project lead, theme lead or who secured funding for the project). Yet, it will be decided by the first author and the rest of the other contributors.
  • Within the BUDS Lab the default case of author order is that the lead researcher and primary writer should be first author and Dr. Miller should be last and corresponding author - there are multiple cases where this default is modified based on the source of funding, collaboration with external parties, and ownership of the original idea. This discussion should occur early in the paper-writing process.
  • Other individuals who have participated in the generation of the research paper but who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgment section with a brief indication of the nature of their contribution. Corresponding author (guidelines simplified from Nature).
• The corresponding author is responsible for communicating with the journal and with managing communication between coauthors. He or she is responsible for the contributions to the manuscript from that team.

  • This responsibility includes, but is not limited to:

    • ensuring that original data upon which the submission is based is preserved and retrievable for reanalysis
    • approving data presentation as representative of the original data
    • foreseeing and minimizing obstacles to the sharing of data, materials, algorithms or reagents described in the work
    • and get approval for submission from all the co-authors before submitting the manuscript.

  • Post submission corresponding author’s responsibility includes:

    • ensuring the accuracy of all content in the proof, in particular, that names of coauthors are present and correctly spelled, and that addresses and affiliations are current
    • be the point of contact for queries about the published paper
    • informing all coauthors of matters arising and to ensure such matters are dealt with promptly. The name and e-mail address of this author are published in the paper.
• List of authorship and the order of authors should be discussed at the kick-start of the paper. The kick-start of a paper may come at any point in the experimental or data analytics process, but should most often occur at the beginning as soon as the scope of the paper has become clear and the necessary parties are in agreement and on-board to write the paper. Any change (adding or removing) to the authorship list should be informed and agreed upon among all contributors. The final order of authorship will be decided before the submission of the paper.
• All authors must disclose relationships that could be viewed as presenting a potential conflict of interest. They are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships between themselves and others that might bias their work. Authors shall explicitly state if potential conflicts do or do not exist. This could be done in the journals COI notification page or in the accompanying cover letter.