Author contribution statement

Details

Published on 15 December 2014

Authors submitting to the EPJ Open journals EPJ DS, EPJ TI, EPJ QT and EPJ NBP are asked to give details of how each author contributed to the work reported in the publication, and their statement becomes visible at the end of the paper. This practice is relatively new in physics journals. As the size and internationality of scientific collaborations has grown, the number of co-authors on each paper has increased. In many cases the conventions about authors listing developed in certain fields or countries are often insufficient and in some cases collide with each other. On the other hand, academics face mounting pressure to be more transparent about their work and to provide quantitative metrics of their contribution to science and society, beyond the number of citations to their papers. A further important consideration is ethics. Inclusion of authors who have not participated in the work reported is unethical, as is the exclusion of names who have actually given a contribution. Such disputes over authorship do arise, accompanied by unwieldy arguments, which journal editors find difficult to resolve. The request for a statement detailing each author’s contribution is meant to heighten awareness of all these issues when submitting a paper. From now on EPJ B, D and E will start requesting an author contribution statement for multi-authored papers.