Authorship and Publication

Scientific and scholarly publications—including articles, abstracts, conference presentations, and grant proposals—serve as the primary means of sharing research findings, ideas, and analyses with scientific, academic, and public audiences. For academic work to meaningfully advance knowledge, it must be published with enough detail and accuracy to allow others to understand, verify, and build upon it.

Ethical Authorship Practice

Authorship can refer to individuals or groups responsible for creating an idea or developing the publication that shares that intellectual or creative work. For authors, successful publication can enhance their reputation, support academic promotion, and improve access to research funding.

The privileges of authorship come with important responsibilities, including the ethical and rigorous planning, execution, analysis, and reporting of research, as well as careful representation of the content and conclusions of scholarly work. Properly recognizing each person's role and contribution can be challenging.

Authorship of a scientific or scholarly paper should be reserved for individuals who have made meaningful and substantial contributions to its intellectual content. Each author is responsible for honestly assessing their own role and the roles of their co-authors to ensure that authorship is assigned in accordance with these standards for every publication on which they are named.

Florida Atlantic has developed policy and guidance documents to help researchers engage in ethical authorship practices.

Predatory Publishing

"Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices." (Grudniewicz, et al., 2019)

Predatory publishers use the open access publishing model for their own profit by soliciting articles from faculty and researchers by

  • collecting extravagant fees from authors 
  • not providing the peer review services that legitimate journals provide
  • using deception to appear legitimate
  • making false claims about services offered
  • unethical business practices
  • exploiting academics’ need to publish
  • lacking concern for the quality of work published
  • not following accepted scholarly publishing best practices

Why Predatory Publishing is Harmful

The dangers of publishing in a predatory journal can include:

  • Lack of Peer-Review: Predatory publishers often make promises of a rigorous, yet speedy peer-review process. Rigorous peer review is a time-consuming process. It cannot be completed in the short time promised by most predatory journals. The peer-review process:
    • establishes the validity of the research
    • prevents falsified work from being accepted and published
    • allows authors to revise and improve papers before publication

Predatory publishers often publish papers that have not gone through any peer-review process.

  • Your Work Could Disappear: Papers published in predatory journals could disappear from the journal's website at any time. This makes it difficult to prove that your paper was published in said journal when applying for promotion or tenure.
  • Your Work Will be Difficult to Find: Predatory publishers often claim to be indexed in popular databases such as Scopus, PubMed, or Web of Science when they are not indexed in these resources. Fortunately, it is easy to double-check this claim by doing a simple search for the journal in these databases.
  • Harmful to Reputation: Publishing in a predatory journal can hurt your reputation through low index, copyright issues, or archiving and discovery service.

How to Protect Yourself

Many resources exist to help researchers evaluate and avoid predatory journals.

Think. Check. Submit. is an easy-to-use checklist style resource. Click below to find out more.

A sequence of colorful buttons with icons and text: a red button with an exclamation mark and the word 'THINK', an orange button with a check mark and the word 'CHECK', and a green button with a right arrow and the word 'SUBMIT'

Jisc Open Policy Finder is a searchable database that researchers can use to check the legitimacy of a journal and the open access policy.

Retraction Watch Hijack Journals Checker. An updated list of fraudulent publishers recycling papers.

Ulrichsweb is a source of detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals (also called serials) of all types

Ulrichs Web logo with a red circle containing a white stylized 'U' on the left, followed by the black text 'Ulrichs Web: Global Serials Directory'

Use of AI

The scientific community has concluded that some Artificial intelligence (AI)  may be used to assist in certain tasks. However, AI may not be named as authors because it cannot meet the criteria for authorship. These include (1) a substantial contribution to the scientific or scholarly content of the work, such as by contributing substantially either to the conception, design, or scholarship essential for the work, or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; (2) drafting the work, or significant portions of the work, or critically reviewed or revised the scientific or scholarly content of the work.

Disclosing use of AI in publications is ethical and supportive of scientific best practices. In addition to always following publisher and journal guidelines and policies, a framework developed by Resnik and Hosseini (2025) offers researchers guidance on appropriate and ethical disclosure of AI use.

Disclosure is mandatory when, for example, using AI
  • To formulate questions or hypotheses, design and conduct experiments.
  • To draft parts of the paper, summarize, paraphrase, significantly revise or synthesize textual content.
  • To translate parts or the whole paper.
  • To collect, analyze, interpret or visualize data (quantitative or qualitative).
  • To extract data for review of the literature (systematic or not) and identify knowledge gaps.
  • To generate synthetic data and images reported in the paper or used in research.
Disclosure is optional when, for example, using AI
  • To edit existing text for grammar, spelling or organization.
  • To find references or verify the relevance of human-found references.
  • To find and generate examples for existing content.
  • To brainstorm and offer suggestions for the organization of a paper or the title of a paper/section.
  • To validate and/or offer feedback on existing ideas, text and code.
Disclosure is unnecessary when, for example, using AI
  • To suggest words or phrases that enhance clarity/readability of an existing sentence.
  • In part of a larger operation where AI is not generating or synthesizing content or making research decisions; for example, when AI is integrated into other systems/machines.
  • As a digital assistant, for example, to help organize and maintain a project’s digital assets and workflows.
Guidance D: Disclosure of AI in Publications

Publishers and discipline specific professional organizations may have differing policies and guidance on disclosing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in research and writing. But they may accept submissions with some AI content (e.g. images, graphs) if the content is clearly marked as such. The use of AI to improve the manuscript (e.g. style, generating reference list) may also be permissible. Publisher policies may change over time as AI tools develop further. Checking these policies before submitting a manuscript is advisable.

Elsevier
Frontiers
PLOS
Sage
Springer Nature
Taylor & Francis
Wiley

Use of Pre-Prints

A preprint is a full draft research paper that is shared publicly through a reputable platform such as medRxiv, bioRxiv, or SocArXiv before it has been peer reviewed. Most preprints are given a digital object identifier (DOI) so they can be cited in other research papers. Preprints achieve many of the goals of journal publishing, but within a much shorter time frame. The biggest benefits fall into 3 areas: credit, feedback, and visibility.

Through pre-print, a researcher may share research findings with the scientific community by obtaining peer feedback before formal publication and potentially enhancing the visibility and citation impact of the final published work (Elmore, 2019).

Pre-prints enable early career researchers to refine their research design, enhance the quality of their work, and provide opportunities for publication that are less viable through traditional methods of publication (Sarabipour et al., 2019).

Please view our Research Roundtable session from February 2025 on “The Value of Data Transparency” with Dr. Zac Robinson, Postdoctoral Fellow, Exercise Science and Health Promotion. to learn more about the benefit or pre-print.

Policies and Guidance

Policy 10.1.7 “Authorship and Publication of Scholarly Work”

Guidance A: Assigning Credit for Contributions

Guidance B: Publication Coordinator Role

Guidance C: Sample Authorship Plan

Guidance D: Disclosure of AI in Publications

Resources

Artificial Intelligence (AI) @ FAU

Committee of Publication Ethics

Florida Atlantic University Libraries: Copyright

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors

National Information Standards Organization: Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT)

Office of Research Integrity: Publications/ Authorship

Abalkina, A. (2021). Detecting a network of hijacked journals by its archive. Scientometrics, 126(9), 7123–7148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04056-0

Elmore, S. A. (2018). Preprints: What role do these have in communicating scientific results? Toxicologic Pathology, 46(4), 364–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192623318767322

Grudniewicz, A., Moher, D., Cobey, K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., Ardern, C., Balcom, L., Barros, T., Berger, M., Buitrago Ciro, J., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M. R., Egger, M., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A., Milzow, K., Mouton, J., Muchenje, M., Olijhoek, T., Ommaya, A., Patwardhan, B., Poff, D., Proulx, L., Rodger, M., Severin, A., Strinzel, M., Sylos-Labini, M., Tamblyn, R., van Niekerk, M., Wicherts, J. M., & Lalu, M. M. (2019). Predatory journals: No definition, no defence. Nature, 576(7786), 210–212. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03759-y

Morandin-Ahuerma, F. (2022). What is artificial intelligence? International Journal of Research Publication and Reviews (3)122, 1947-1951.

Resnik, D. B., & Hosseini, M. (2025). Disclosing artificial intelligence use in scientific research and publication: When should disclosure be mandatory, optional, or unnecessary? Accountability in Research, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2025.2481949

Sarabipour, S., Debat, H. J., Emmott, E., Burgess, S. J., Schwessinger, B., & Hensel, Z. (2019). On the value of preprints: An early career researcher perspective. PLoS Biology, 17(2), Article e3000151. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000151