Authorship changes and extensive manuscript revisions

Increased pressure to ‘publish or perish’ in academia internationally has resulted in people taking advantage of opportunities to publish research articles that have gone through little or no peer scrutiny at all. Poor editorial oversight provides such opportunities. Whether these opportunities are organised ventures, referred to as paper mills, or individual attempts, they manipulate the peer review process.

How it’s done


The author submits a manuscript that is likely to pass peer review with revisions. At the stage of submitting revisions, they remove themselves from the author list, adds new authors (possibly with fake email addresses) and instead of submitting a revised version of the initial manuscript, they submit a completely new manuscript. 

Poor editorial oversight


The editor never checked the identity of the ‘author’, never noticed the change in the author list and paid attention to their fake email addresses after peer review and never re-read the manuscript in comparison to the initial submission to ensure that the revisions recommended by the peer reviewers were completed. 

Dos


As soon as you are assigned a submission…

  • Review the submission metadata.
  • Check author name and affiliation. Do a quick online search for a person with this name in the specific institution. Does the author have an institutional profile, institutional email address? Do they have an ORCID profile?
  • Read the cover letter, if there is one.
  • Check the email address(es) provided. Is it a personal email address? Do the authors’ (if more than one) email addresses share common elements (e.g. carter433@..., jones433@...). 
  • Enquire with the author(s) about any elements of their submission that do not serve transparency. It is highly likely that authors were not thinking of transparency when they were submitting their article and there is a logical explanation. It never hurts to be sure.

When you examine the appropriateness of the submission for your journal


  • Stay as close to the focus and scope of your journal as possible. Submissions that fall further out of scope put you in a vulnerable position as you are less likely to spot anything improper about them. If a submission is within scope but further from your own personal expertise, remember that you can request advice from relevant members of your editorial board and, if you have them, section editors.

When revisions are submitted


  • Compare the new version against the old. If significant edits have been made, do they correspond with what the reviewers requested and/or does the author’s revision feedback explain the edits?
  • Always ask authors to provide detail on the revisions that have been made, ideally in relation to the review feedback.
  • If major revisions have been made, either on request from the reviewer or on the authors own initiative, the revisions should always be sent back out for comment from the reviewers.

Don’ts


  • Don’t ignore changes in the metadata. Especially authorship changes should only be allowed after approval by your editorial account manager. There might be ethical issues (e.g. approval by all co-authors) that need to be addressed prior to any change in the author list.
  • Don’t accept an article if you have not checked its revisions. If substantial revisions have been made, a submission needs to be peer reviewed again.
  • Don’t allow changes in the author list unless all authors (old and new) provide written agreement that they agree with the edits being made
  • Don’t disregard personal/generic email addresses (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail etc.) as authors’ only contact details. Make every effort to double check that the email address indeed belongs to the author: is their CV available online and does it include this email address, is the address listed in their institutional webpage? Try to use institutional email addresses whenever possible.

Processing Official Authorship Changes Before Publication


Submitting authors may request changes to the list of contributors if they feel that others need to be recognized for working on manuscript revisions, or if authors were accidentally left off the contributor list on the first submission. Alternatively, there may be reasons for an author to be removed from the list of contributors, if it has been determined that their contribution was not substantial enough to warrant authorship before or after revisions based on the journal’s guidelines.

Even when submitting authors openly request an authorship change, editors should be cautious. Authorship revisions should always be based on the contribution to the paper and not on personal feuds or academic politics. Requests to change authorship before publication may indicate an attempt to disguise ghost, guest, or gift authorship:

  • Ghost authorship: when someone who has made a substantial contribution to the piece is left off the contributor list, such as a ghostwriter. 
  • Guest authorship: when a researcher agrees to have their name on the paper to boost its legitimacy without actually contributing to the research or writing as an author.
  • Gift authorship: listing someone who has not made a contribution which constitutes authorship, usually as an academic favour.

All of these constitute unethical conduct and should be kept in mind when an authorship change is requested. 

If a request for an authorship change is made, make sure to:

  • Require that a proper justification should always be provided to the editors for an authorship change to be approved prior to publication. 
  • Acquire an agreement, in writing, from every contributor regarding the requested change, including any who would be added to or removed from the author list.
  • Consider if there are any warning signs that indicate a requested change could be an attempt to disguise ghost, guest, or gift authorship.
  • Always investigate any claims made by a contributor that misconduct could be occurring.

Further resources


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