Authorship at WUR

Please consult the document 'Authorship, citation and affiliation guidelines with respect to publishing research results at Wageningen University & Research', for the full guidelines on authorship, including those on citation and affiliation.

Summary guidelines authorship

Guidelines for authorship vary among disciplines. In general, authorship implies that a person has made a substantial contribution to, at least, two of the following research activities of a manuscript:
• initiation and design of the research
• data collection
• data analysis
• writing of the manuscript.

Co-authorship

An author of a manuscript should have made a significant scientific contribution to the manuscript and shares responsibility and accountability for the results
reported. Lesser contributions by others should be listed in the acknowledgment, if applicable. An administrative relationship to a study or a relationship as supervisor or being responsible for the funding does not necessarily qualify a person for authorship. The submitting author should, at all times, send all co-authors the final draft of the manuscript and receive their approval before submission and publication of the work.

Many journals nowadays require the contribution(s) of each author to be stated in the manuscript, e.g. the CRediT – Contribute Roles Taxonomy used by Elsevier is
now used by more than 1000 of their journals to identify 14 contributor roles to scientific scholarly output (https://casrai.org/credit/). Furthermore, journals may
require an author to provide an ORCID iD. The ORCID iD is a unique identifier that distinguishes you and your work from other researchers and their work.

Order of the authors

For many disciplines at WUR, the first author is the person who has made the most important contribution. Co-authors can be ranked in order of decreasing
importance of their contribution or in alphabetical order if their contributions were equal. The second or last author may be the second most important contributor,
the direct supervisor or the research leader, depending on the discipline. Note that all supervisors and research leaders mentioned as co-author should have made a
substantial contribution to the manuscript in at least two of the above-mentioned activities.

Tips for managing authorship

• It is recommended, based on expected research activities, to agree early in the research process on criteria and tasks for first authorship and the order of co-authors.
• Contributors should collectively decide on authorship and the order in which authors appear on the manuscript.
• In case of disagreement or unclarity regarding authorship, consult the chair of the group, research institute director or the PhD advisor of a Graduate
  School.
• Clarify any issue or conflict regarding authorship before submitting a manuscript to a journal or a publisher. Adding or removing authors and changing the
  order of authors is often very difficult once a manuscript has been accepted for publication.

WUR author affiliations

Make sure you use the correct Wageningen University & Research affiliation(s), following Brand policy Wageningen University & Research. Check that the external affiliations are also correct.

For WUR open access deals, the corresponding author must be affiliated with WUR and have a valid WUR email account at the time of publication. Note that the manuscript may be published long after submission. If you are on a temporary contract (e.g. PhD, post-doc contract), make sure that somebody with a valid WUR account at the time of publication is the corresponding author.