Authorship

Resources to support responsible authorship practices

Author affiliations, international co-authors, and foreign collaborations

Research collaborations and co-authorship, often with researchers outside the United States, are essential for academic scholarship. External sponsors have increased their oversight of international activities associated with funded research, and it’s important to be aware of how sponsors interpret your co-author relationships.

Sponsors may use author affiliations in publications as evidence of collaboration and may interpret author affiliations as indicating a relationship that needed investigator disclosure or sponsor pre-approval. Sponsors have sponsor- and award-specific requirements for PIs and other Key Personnel to disclose international activities, including activities not tied to a specific proposal or funded project, to Texas Tech and/or to the agency. In some circumstances, sponsors (especially NIH) require investigators to obtain prior approval from the sponsor before adding a foreign component to a project. If sponsors use author affiliations in project-related publications as evidence of collaboration, they may question affiliations that appear to indicate an undisclosed relationship or an unapproved foreign award component.

Accurate author affiliations identify institution where work was done

To ensure accurate assessment of collaborative work, publications should identify the institutions where the research was performed. Specifically, the author affiliation for each author should identify the institution at which that author worked or studied when the research was conducted. Use an author note to identify current contact information, such as a current email address, and any changes in address at the time of publication or during manuscript preparation.

Specific guidance for NIH-funded investigators about how to disclose foreign components and foreign co-authors

NIH has long-standing requirements for pre-approval of any foreign award component (see May 2026 guidance). A foreign component is the performance of any significant scientific element or segment of an NIH-supported project outside the United States. Any foreign components must be described and justified at proposal submission or during the award period, must receive NIH approval before activity begins, and must be reported in the annual Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR).

However, the May 2026 guidance and a June 2026 NIH Extramural Nexus post explain that NIH is paying close attention to foreign co-authorship, i.e., to co-authorship by an individual located or employed outside the US, because co-authorship may indicate that a researcher outside the United States contributed a significant scientific element to the NIH-funded project. More recently, NIH provided detailed scenarios to answer investigator questions related to foreign co-authorship and foreign award components. You may view the scenarios and FAQs here.

Faculty should not assume that every foreign co-author automatically creates a foreign component that must be reported in Section G of the RPPR. At the same time, faculty should not assume that a foreign component exists only when NIH funds are sent to a foreign institution. A foreign component may exist even when a foreign collaborator or co-author receives no funds from the NIH award.

Faculty should contact their ORS Research Administrator if they anticipate that a publication from an NIH award might involve a co-author from a foreign institution. Faculty should also contact their ORS Research Administrator and Export & Security Compliance (ESC) before including or initiating foreign involvement on an NIH-supported project if an individual located at an institution outside the United States will provide substantive scientific input, analysis, methods development, data interpretation, experimental work, project design, or other meaningful intellectual contribution to the NIH-funded work.

Examples that may require pre-review by ORS, ESC, and/or NIH include:

• A collaborator based at a non-US institution provides regular input on study design, methods, analysis, interpretation, or techniques.
• A consultant performs analysis or provides scientific input from outside the United States.
• A collaboration with a researcher at a non-US institution is expected to result in co-authorship on an NIH-supported publication.
• A new foreign collaboration will be added to an active NIH award, including awards such as R35 mechanisms.
• Any foreign involvement on an NIH award arising from a NOFO that limits or prohibits foreign components.

Examples that generally may not create a foreign component include:

• A former student or postdoc who performed the NIH-funded work at Texas Tech but later moved to a foreign institution before publication. Note: NIH does expect that the publication will identify the US institution as the individual’s author affiliation, with the current address and email provided only in an author note.
• A researcher located abroad only assists with manuscript editing after the scientific work was completed at Texas Tech. Note: In this case, the author’s role should be described clearly in an author note, Acknowledgements section, and/or CRediT authorship contribution statement.
• Occasional informal conferring with a non-U.S. researcher who does not contribute to the NIH-supported work or resulting publication.
• A foreign co-author who contributed only to a non-NIH-funded portion of a multi-funded publication. The portions of the work to which the author contributed should be identified clearly, probably in an Acknowledgements section.

Faculty should also note NIH’s expectations about publication acknowledgments and affiliations. NIH grants should be cited only when the NIH award actually supported or directly benefited the work. If the NIH award supported only part of the published work, the portion of the work supported by NIH should be identified clearly in the publication (likely in the Acknowledgments section) and in the annual RPPR. In publications, each author’s affiliation should reflect where the NIH-funded work was performed. An author’s current address at the time of publication or during manuscript preparation, if different, should be provided only in an author note or in the Acknowledgements.

The practical rule is, “ask before the collaboration begins or before the manuscript is submitted”. Early review protects the faculty member, the project, and the institution.

Criteria for authorship

The TTU Graduate School has established acknowledgement of student contributions in published material as a responsibility of faculty who serve as Major Professors [The Role of Academic Advisors, Major Professors, and Committees]

COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) resources about authorship include two minimum requirements for authorship [Authorship | COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics]

1. “making a substantial contribution to the work and…”
2. “…being accountable for the work and its published form.”

Guidance for authorship contributions developed by the NIH Office of Intramural Research identifies complexities that can arise over the course of a project [see https://bit.ly/314njwK]

The Office of Research Integrity offers a training module with 28 guidelines for ethical writing. Guidelines 24 - 27 discuss authorship criteria [Avoiding Plagiarism, Self-plagiarism, and Other Questionable Writing Practices: A Guide to Ethical Writing | ORI - The Office of Research Integrity (hhs.gov)]

24. Authorship determination should be discussed prior to commencing research collaboration and should be based on established guidelines, such as those of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.
25. Only those individuals who have made substantive contributions to a project merit authorship in a paper.
26. Faculty-student collaborations should follow the same criteria to establish authorship. Mentors must exercise great care to neither award authorship to students whose contributions do not merit it, nor to deny authorship and due credit to the work of students.
27. Academic or professional ghost authorship in the sciences is ethically unacceptable.

The criteria for authorship developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) include four criteria for authorship and recommendations for meeting the criteria and acknowledging contributions of individuals who do not meet all four [ICMJE | Recommendations | Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors]

2. Who is an Author?

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

• 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 reviewing it critically for important intellectual content
• Final approval of the version to be published
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Guidance for describing roles of each author

• Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) is a community-owned taxonomy that can be used to describe each author’s contributions. CRediT is not used to assign authorship, but rather to identify the specific type of contribution made by each author or other contributor. Adopters of CRediT – CRediT (niso.org) identifies journals that have adopted the CRediT taxonomy.
• The Science Student Council of the American Psychological Association has resources and tools to help students and advisors identify and negotiate authorship: Tips for determining authorship credit (apa.org).

Guidance for creating authorship agreements

• Rasmussen et al. 2023 Authorship agreements benefit researchers and research culture. Nature Human Behavior 7:2044-5.
• SharedIt link: Authorship agreements benefit researchers and research culture | Nature Human Behaviour
• Example agreement: Authorship agreement | J. Murrey Atkins Library | UNC Charlotte
• Courses to stimulate discussion with colleagues and students: Take Our Course — the authorship project
• Chapter 12, Setting up Collaborations, from Making the Right Moves, A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty, Second Edition: https://www.hhmi.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/making-the-right-moves-second-edition.pdf.

Strategies to resolve disputes

Disputes about authorship can arise when collaborators differ in their perceptions of who contributes to a work and of who is responsible, accountable, or credited for the work. Authorship disputes should be resolved through informal or, if necessary, formal academic processes. Authors should first try to resolve a dispute informally within the research group. It may be useful to seek advice about how to initiate the discussion from a colleague outside the research group. If the dispute persists, the issue should be taken to the Department Chair or Institute Director. If these steps do not resolve the dispute, graduate students may use the procedures in Section 5 of TTU OP 64.07. Faculty and research staff who dispute the actions taken by the Department Chair or Institute Director may use procedures outlined in TTU OP 74.02 for disputes involving externally-funded research; in all other such cases faculty may use procedures outlined in TTU OP 35.02.

If a credible allegation of plagiarism exists in addition to the authorship dispute, the Dean or Institute Director should consult with the TTU Research Integrity Officer (RIO). The TTU RIO provides resources and guidance to individuals and academic units, and reviews plagiarism allegations under TTU OP 74.08, but does not otherwise participate in the academic processes for resolving authorship disputes.