 The next important step in planning your manuscript is to determine authorship. Are you going to write alone or are you going to write with a team? Let's talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each. First of all, single authorship. The advantages are you're in total control. You get to make all the decisions. It's on your timeline. But the disadvantage is it's hard work. You have to do the entire paper by yourself. So you might want to think about working with a team. But let's talk about some of those advantages and disadvantages for multiple author papers. The advantage is the workload is broken up. Each person's only writing a portion of a paper. The disadvantages though is if you're working with a team where some of the members really don't produce. And then how do you handle that? What are you going to do? So my recommendation is if you're going to write with an author team, the first thing you need to do is to decide who will be first author. First author usually is considered in nursing more prestigious of a position to be in. And it's important that right up front, before you ever write anything, that that is decided among your team and the order of the rest of the members of the team. I'd encourage you to write this decision down and keep it. The second decision you need to make as an author team is what will happen if one of the members of the team doesn't come through. Everybody has life events that pop up on them, that distract them, that might hold them back by being a contributing member. So as a team, when you're still friends, things are going well, I would encourage you to decide after what point of time does the author team get to vote you off the island. After how many weeks, how many months of waiting for you, when you're late with your part, can the rest of the group say, sorry, you're no longer a member of the team, you're holding up our progress. I would also encourage you to write that down. And everyone sign and put a date. It's much easier to make these agreements at the beginning when everyone's friends and has good intentions than to have that very difficult conversation with an author who might be in the middle of a life crisis. Think about author teams. Our physician colleagues always seem to write in author team. Rarely do you see a single authored paper in the medical literature. And what I'd suggest is perhaps they're working smarter than maybe we do in nursing where we tend to have many single authored papers. When you form writing teams and now maybe you're only responsible to write one fourth of a paper, you actually could perhaps produce more papers because your team can work together. So I think it's time that we rethink in nursing the use of author teams. I would suggest we need to do more of that so that each of us makes more contributions to the literature and we can provide more information to our readers. Also when you're working with your author team, it's important that you decide the workload. Will all members carry the same workload? Usually the first author is considered the team leader and will pull together the article, but perhaps another team member is good at editing and would prefer to take the workload of editing the entire paper. Whoever does it, it's important to know that you can't just glue together three or four different parts written by different people because each of us has our own style of writing. One member of the team has to go through the whole paper and edit it to a single style. Let me tell you about a paper I had once written by two people, and I could tell you as an editor exactly the paragraph where the writing changed. It was an excellent paper. So I contacted the authors and just asked one or the other to edit. Both styles were good. They were just different. So to pick one style of writing and edit the paper into that one style. The authors told me they were too busy. They weren't willing to do that. Unfortunately then, I had to reject the paper because it wouldn't have flowed well for readers to have a paper with two completely different writing styles. So if an editor asks you in your revision to make your paper one single writing style, it's so important that you do that for your paper to be successful and have a chance of being accepted. Another sticky wicket may be student-faculty joint authorship. Sometimes students feel that they're being used by faculty members, that they don't get a fair shake, or that they don't have the power to speak up. So these can be difficult situations. The question is, who really owns the work? Who owns the idea? For example, if a student finishes their doctoral dissertation for a PhD degree, it's considered that's the student's work and the student's data. In my opinion, the student should be the first author. The student might want to invite faculty from their dissertation committee to participate in publishing, but it truly I believe should be the student's work and the student has the right to authorship and the student owns the data. So the question really becomes, who is entitled to authorship, particularly when a team works on a project? And there are some national guidelines about that, and really all who are listed should have been qualified. It's not appropriate to say to your friend, listen, I'll put you on my paper if you put me on your paper, even though I'm contributing nothing to your work and you're contributing nothing to my work. That's not considered ethical. That shouldn't be done. So all who are listed as authors should be qualified to be called authors, and all who were qualified should be put on the list. So how do we know who's qualified? One guideline is the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. They have published a national guideline, and they say that all four of the following conditions must be met for you to be considered an author. First of all, you must have made some substantial contribution to the work. You must have helped with the design of the project or the study, helped with gathering data or analyzing data or interpreting the data. So in other words, you had to have a role in that project. And you must have participated somehow in drafting the article, in revising it, critically analyzing it, editing it. So you must have agreed to the intellectual content and contributed to it as an author. You must approve the final paper before it is submitted. That's very important that all authors who are listed can say they looked at the paper, they read the paper, and they approve the final version. You must also agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work. If the paper is ever challenged, you can't back out and say, well, I really had nothing to do with data collection. I didn't know it was fraudulent. You can't back out that easily. You have to be able to answer any questions related to the integrity of the work. So it's very important that all authors must meet all four criteria. And that's because there have been problems with papers and journals. For example, I had an experience where we published a paper and an author contacted me and said, I never approve for my name to be on this paper. I don't want my name associated with this paper. I think it's poor quality and I want my name removed. Well, once the article's in published print, there's no way to remove it. So that's unfortunate. So now journal editors have gotten much stricter in that when you submit a paper, they may ask every author to sign a form saying they have indeed met all four criteria. The reverses sometimes happen where papers are published and someone contacts the editor and says, this was my work. I helped with this project. I helped with this idea. I wrote a part of the paper and I'm not listed. I demand to be listed while again it's too late, the paper's in print. So you'll see more and more of a rigorous questioning and documentation in the role of the authors that's being asked by many journals. And that's the reason why. Now the following factors by themselves do not justify that you are an author. And one is simply it was your funding. You wrote the grant that got perhaps the money to do the project. The acquisition of funding alone is not enough to qualify you as an author. If you gave writing assistance or you were a technical editor or you were a language interpreter because perhaps English was not the first language of the author and you helped rewrite it into better English grammar and punctuation, that does not give you right to authorship. Perhaps the author asked you would you proofread their paper? Do you see any mistakes that maybe they missed? Proofreading alone does not qualify you to be an author. If you're the supervisor of a research group, maybe you're the supervisor of data collectors, that supervision alone does not allow you to be qualified as an author. So I can't emphasize enough how important it is to be clear on who is an author. Let me tell you a story about a student I had once who had authored a paper, but there was a fact in the paper that she wasn't quite sure about and couldn't find the answer in the library. So she decided to go to the hospital and ask a physician colleague to clarify did she have the fact correct and the physician did help and clarified the fact. The paper was then published and the physician contacted me as the faculty mentor and she was irate that she was not listed as an author. And I had to help that physician understand that the fact that she consulted with the student clarified facts did not make her qualify to be an author. So if you're working with people, if they help you in any way with their paper, if you ask somebody, would you just read it? Tell me if it makes sense. Be clear that that does not qualify them to be an author. There's a way perhaps to acknowledge their contribution at the end of the paper. You might want to put an acknowledgement of thanks to a certain person who helped you in the editing, the proof reading, the data acquisition. It would be nice to acknowledge their contribution, but be clear with that person that what they did doesn't qualify for authorship. You don't want any misunderstandings after your paper has been published.