According to the Government's Authorship guide (2019), created to support the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2018) (the Code):
An author is an individual who:
The University's Authorship Policy (MPF1181) reinforces the Code and sets out "standards of responsible, honest, fair and accurate acknowledgement of authorship contribution."
5.1. Individuals qualify as authors if they have made a significant intellectual or scholarly contribution to research and its output. Acknowledging that some journals, disciplines, and institutions may require a higher threshold, the University (with rare exceptions) requires authorship contributions to in general meet at least two or more of the following five criterion (as discussed in the authorship guide that accompanies the Code):
a) conception and design of the research described in the research output;
b) acquisition and/or processing of research data where it has required significant intellectual judgement or input;
c) substantial contribution of knowledge that influences the research and its output;
d) analysis or interpretation of research data; and
e) drafting significant parts of the research output or redrafting the research output so as to critically change or substantively advance the interpretation.
If someone was involved in supporting the research and its output, but did not make a substantial contribution that would contribute authorship, recognition in an acknowledgement statement would be appropriate.
Note that different publishers have different criteria for what constitutes authorship. Many medical journals, for example, align with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations on authorship.
Authorship can sometimes become a contentious space. See the Research Gateway page on Authorship for further information on navigating authorship conversations, as well as a Research Authorship Agreement Template (UoM log-in required).
The Authorship Policy notes the important role played by the "coordinating author" in scholarly publications, defining the role as follows:
5.11. In addition to fulfilling the criteria for authorship, the Coordinating Author is responsible for managing the communication between the co-authors and managing and implementing the Authorship Agreement. They are normally responsible for overseeing the research and attesting to the integrity and accuracy of the research as a whole.
Scholarly publishers usually refer to the "coordinating author" as the "corresponding author." The corresponding author is not necessarily the first or primary author. Some publishers allow multiple corresponding authors, but usually require that one is the "responsible corresponding author" for publishing purposes. For more on the expectations of corresponding authors, see publisher guidance, such as that from Elsevier and Springer Nature.
The corresponding author's affiliations also determine eligibility for using institutions' open access publishing agreements. For most of our agreements, the (responsible) corresponding author's primary affiliation must be with the University of Melbourne. Affiliations with partner research institutes and hospitals are not sufficient to qualify for the use of institutional open access publishing agreements.
Eligibility for the University's open access publishing agreements is usually determined by the corresponding author’s primary institutional affiliation. These affiliations are sometimes verified by the author's use of an institutional email address, or matched against an institution's unique Ringgold ID or ROR ID.
In general, authors should affiliate primarily with the institution at which the bulk of the research was undertaken, even if that is not their current institution. For more on the conventions of affiliation, see the COPE Conversation "Claiming institutional affiliations" (2023).
The CRediT system is used by many publishers to clearly indicate contributor roles. It does not itself determine who would qualify for authorship, but can help clarify co-authors' roles.
The taxonomy outlines 14 roles: Conceptualisation; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Software; Resources; Supervision; Validation; Visualisation; Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing.
Fulfiling one of these roles in isolation is rarely sufficient to constitute authorship. For example, to qualify for authorship in Sage journals that have adopted CRediT, an individual must have been responsible for Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal Analysis, or Investigation, and either Writing – original draft, or Writing – review & editing.
You can see examples of CRediT in action in the authorship contribution statements at ends of many STEMM articles (e.g., 10.1111/medu.15375 and 10.1016/j.nima.2023.169013).