Authorship of all scientific papers (including Cochrane protocols and reviews) establishes accountability, responsibility and credit (Rennie 1997, Flanagin 1998, Rennie 1998). When deciding who should go in the by-line for Cochrane reviews, it is important to distinguish individuals who have made a substantial contribution to the review (and who should be listed) and those who have made other contributions, which should be noted in the acknowledgements section. Ideally, the order of authors should relate to their relative contributions to the review. The person who contributed most should be listed first. Authorship should be based on substantial contributions to all of the following three steps, based on the requirements for submitting papers to biomedical journals, developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE 2006):
Conception and design of study, or analysis and interpretation of data;
Drafting the review or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
Final approval of the version to be published;
Affiliations of authors will be published within the completed protocol or review, so authors should ensure that these fields are completed and up to date in ‘Archie’, the web interface of The Cochrane Collaboration’s Information Management System (IMS). The fields that must be completed are the First name(s) and Last name(s) of the author, Organisation and Country. If a co-author does not have a publishable address, but should still appear in the by-line for the citation, then the Organisation and Country should be those of the Review Group (for example Smith J. c/o Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group, UK). Group authorship is possible but requires an entry to be created in ‘Archie’ in the name of the group (see Chapter 2).