# Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices
## 2 Authors, Contributors and Acknowledees  
The first formal authorship criteria for research articles were issued in 1988 by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) [4], following numerous \"calls for attention to standards for authorship\" in the US research setting (reviewed in [14]). The ICMJE criteria, eventually adopted by many biomedical research journals, also served as the basis for recommendations devised in other disciplines. Authorship criteria today are produced by scientific societies, funders, professional associations, publishers and academic institutions. According to a large multidisciplinary survey, authorship definitions are more common in the sciences than in the humanities, and more likely to appear in journals' instructions to authors than in disciplinary societies' ethics codes [15]. The authors suggested that variations among policies may create confusion and hinder good authorship practices. In fact, studies in different academic settings have revealed deficiencies in the knowledge of authorship criteria (e.g., in [16; 17]), lack of agreement about them [18], and noncompliance for various reasons [19; 20; 21; 22]. Furthermore, in collaborative studies, each person's relative contribution is difficult for the research team to determine and for others to understand [23]. As a result, authorship disputes remain a troublesome issue [19; 24; 25; 26; 27]. Because of problems with full and fair attribution, in 1997 [PERSON] and colleagues at _JAMA_ (an ICMJE member journal) proposed \"contributorship\" [7]:  
We argue for a radical conceptual and systematic change... We propose dropping the outmoded notion of author in favor of the more useful and realistic one of _contributor_. This requires disclosure to readers of the contributions made to the research and to the manuscript by the contributors, so they can accept both credit and responsibility. (emphasis in the original)  
The proposal was adopted by many biomedical journals and some journals in other disciplines, but not in a standardized way. Importantly, authorship was not abandoned (contributors who meet authorship criteria continue to be named in the byline); instead journals added a new section on \"Author Contributions\" at the end of articles to provide information on the specific roles of each author. In 2004, the ICMJE issued guidance on the use of the Acknowledgments section of research articles to recognize support received from non-author contributors [28]:  
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.... Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. The Acknowledgments section they referred to had been an optional and occasional part of research articles for at least 100 years, but became a regular feature after the 1960s [29]. According to [PERSON], \"Functionally, acknowledgements convey public gratitude for often private gestures of assistance which contributed in some meaningful way to the research or scholarship being reported\" [30] (p. 19). He emphasized that acknowledgments \"are not trivial, meta-textual flourishes [but] quasi formal records of often significant intellectual influences\" [30] (p. 98). The Acknowledgments section is currently used by authors to publicly recognize persons who contributed to the reported research in a way that does not merit authorship but without which the study could not have been completed and published. Text analyses of Acknowledgments sections have identified several recurrent types of non-author contributions, including financial, conceptual, instrumental-technical, moral, and editorial [30; 31]. Studies of the frequency of acknowledgments of these non-author roles across disciplines and countries have provided a wealth of information on researchers' practices and how these have evolved over time.