deserved

To date, more than 500 journals have adopted theICMJE’s (1997) principles of authorship as laid out in the5th edition of theUniform Requirements for ManuscriptsSubmitted to Biomedical Journals(Klein, 1999; Stern,2000). According to these concrete guidelines, candidateauthors must satisfy three conditions. They must make:“. . . substantial contributions to (a) conception and design,or analysis and interpretation of data; and to (b) drafting thearticle or revising it critically for important intellectualcontent; and on (c) final approval of the version to bepublished.” Laudable though these guidelines are, it is un-likely that they will solve the problem. A study by Hoen etal. (1998) in the Netherlands found that authors and theircoauthors did not always agree with one another’s assess-ments that the ICMJE criteria had been met. In the UK,Bhopal et al.’s (1997) survey of medical researchers dis-covered that, although most respondents concurred with thethree criteria (more than 80% in each case), a majority(62%) did not feel that all three conditions should have to besatisfied to warrant author status. F

are that an author should have made substantial contributions to the study as well as to drafting the work, and should be able to identify all co-authors on a study and their contribution.