Authorship Guidelines

Authorship

The Department of Medicine recommends following the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) rules for manuscript authorship.

The ICMJE[1] clearly defines four (4) criteria, including:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data for the work;
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
Final approval of the version to be published; and
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions raised to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Those who do not meet all of the criteria cannot be identified as an author, but should instead be acknowledged. Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) qualify for acknowledgement are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading.

When a large multi-author group has conducted the work, the group should decide who will be an author before the work is started and confirm who is an author before submitting the manuscript for publication. The criteria used to determine the order in which authors are listed on the byline may vary, and are to be decided collectively by the author group. Decision to remove or add an author after manuscript submission should be agreed upon by all authors, and detailed explanation provided to the journal editor.

The issue of authorship is particularly important to junior faculty as they launch their independent careers in terms of publication and become recognized as important contributors to the literature. There are a number of misconceptions. On one hand, junior investigators may believe that including their senior colleagues is expected or will improve the credibility of their work. On the other hand, senior faculty members may believe that they should be listed as an author based solely on logistic, financial or administrative support alone, which contradicts the required criteria for authorship stated above. An approach to fostering independence for our junior investigators is for senior investigators to consider not being listed as the senior author, but rather in a co-author position.

Authors should disclose whether they used artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the production of submitted work. Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter to the editor and the submitted work in the appropriate section if applicable, how they used it. Authors should be able to assert that there is no plagiarism in their paper, including in text and images produced by the AI.

It is important to note that violation of the policies for authorship on scientific and scholarly publications is considered research misconduct (https://research.utoronto.ca/research-integrity/research-integrity).

Authorship issues that arise in the Department of Medicine should be flagged to the Chair and Vice-Chair, Research, to be referred to the Office of the Vice-President Research and Innovation, as necessary.

[1] International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. Jan 2026.

Predatory Journals

Predatory or pseudo-journals are publications that operate with the motive of financial gain, luring academics to publish their work without providing services that legitimate, scholarly journals offer [1]. These journals do not follow scholarly publishing standards such as peer review, editing services and proper publication indexing [2]. They usually operate by sending e-mails to large numbers of individuals asking for manuscript submissions with the promise of quick publication in exchange for lower article processing charges (APC) [2].

Dangers and ethical considerations when publishing with predatory journals include [3]:

Misrepresentation - predatory journals falsify who they are and the services they offer

Lack of editorial and publishing standards and practices - there is a lack of standards and best practices which has been set by the scholarly publishing community with the aim of improving quality and ethics of published work
Academic deception - authors misrepresent their scholarly effort by publishing in predatory journals
Research and funding wasted - research work may not receive recognition it deserves and become inaccessible hence wasting effort, risk and funding involved in research
Lack of archived content - content is not archived in third party sites making it inaccessible in the future
Undermining confidence in research literature - predatory journals undermine the faith that readers and the public have in research literature

If you are experiencing an issue related to predatory publication, please contact research.integrity@utoronto.ca for assistance.

Please also review the U of T webpages, which include the helpful “How to avoid deceptive publishers" (https://research.utoronto.ca/engaging-research/how-avoid-deceptive-publishers) and Predatory Publishing Checklist (https://library.utoronto.ca/use/tool/predatory-publishing-checklist).

Additional Resources:

[1] Clark J. BMJ Blog. How to Avoid Predatory Journals - A Five Point Plan. January 2015.
[2] Laine C. Winker MA. World Association of Medical Editors. Identifying Predatory or Pseudo-Journals. February 2017.
[3] Ferris LE, Winker MA. Ethical issues in publishing in predatory journals. Biochem Med (Zagreb). 2017 Jun 15;27(2):279-284.