The University is committed to the design, performance, analysis, dissemination, and review of research and scholarly activities according to the highest ethical standards. This implies adherence to the core values of the research enterprise, including honesty, fairness, impartiality, transparency, efficiency, and protection of confidentiality. Below we provide guides to help researchers understand and appreciate some of the ethical issues associated with adherence to these values and standards.
Authorship has important implications and carries substantial responsibilities. Authorship of books and journal articles is used in evaluation of scholars for jobs, promotions, grants/fellowships, and awards. In turn, authors are those who can be assigned responsibility both for the accuracy of published data and conclusions and for any ethical or scientific concerns that arise; they may also own or control data, tissues, reagents and other scientific materials discussed in the published work. As commonly understood, an author is someone who is an originator of a novel written work. In scholarly journals and other outlets for scholarly publication, an author is understood as someone who has made a substantial intellectual contribution to the published work. These guidelines cover authorship in books, scientific journals, conference proceedings, published abstracts, scientific posters, grant proposals, and other scholarly works. Although efforts have been made to be as general in scope as possible, it must be acknowledged that the guidelines outlined below are most clearly relevant to scholarly works in STEM or social science fields, and do not account for all differences in practices in different scholarly fields.
Fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in scholarly works is prohibited, as are the practices known as “guest authorship”, “courtesy authorship”, and “ghost authorship” (or ghostwriting). Criteria for authorship can be summarized as follows:
Decisions about inclusion/exclusion of authors, and their listed order in the published work, should be made jointly by the authors. A person may refuse to be listed as an author despite having made substantial intellectual contributions; this however may not be done deliberately to subvert the prohibition on “ghost authorship” described below. Discussions about authorship and author order should occur as early in the research process as feasible, to reduce the probability of later disputes. These discussions should be re-opened when required by changes to the direction or scope of the project. The “lead” (senior or corresponding) author(s) should lead authorship discussions. Note that when a publication is substantially based on the work comprising a student’s dissertation, the student should be the primary author. Each research group leader should ensure that each member of the research team understands the group's authorship policies and practices. This information should ideally be conveyed in writing at the time that a person joins the research group. When disputes about author inclusion or author order arise, they should be handled by consensus among the group of authors, or, if necessary, by disinterested individuals chosen as mediators by the group; e.g., the consult service offered by the University of Miami Bioethics Institute. If the mediators selected by the author group cannot provide a resolution acceptable to the group, the dispute should be brought to research leadership for review and advice. Final decisions about authorship, where disagreement still exists, are made by the senior author(s).