Authorship Guidelines

Core Directors or other Core personnel will, in some but not all cases, reasonably anticipate co-authorship on publications arising from Core activities.  The defining line for this will not be any different from collaborations that might occur outside the core structure.  To avoid misunderstandings authorship questions will be defined at the time core service are initiated.

1.  In cases where cores are supplying key samples or analytic input, then Core Directors should generally be included as co-authors. This would include:

a. For Cores B and C, use of skin and lung samples collected as part of Core investigator activities and provided to investigators as sections or stained for investigators.

b. For all Cores, use of analytic capabilities of Cores, typically requiring Core Director input.

2.  In cases where the Core is simply providing technical services, then Core Directors should NOT generally be included as co-authors. This would include:

a. For Cores B and C, use of the skin or lung pathology core services to process and/or stain/immunostain samples supplied by Core Investigators without any analysis provided by Cores, i.e. simply returning stained or unstained slides to the investigator.

b. Testing of proteomic or gene expression arrays in which samples are provided to the Core by Core Investigators and results sent back to the investigator without any analytical input from the Core.

Consortia Authorship

In addition to Core Director authorship rights, Core Investigator/Users will also have rights as co-authors based on sample and or clinical database contributions to cores. For example, one of the more exciting anticipated outcomes of core utilization will be the generation of large datasets that include many or even all of the consortia of investigators.

An example serves to illustrate this most easily. The dataset generated from all the investigators utilizing the proteomic core will likely provide a powerful database for understanding the relationships between circulating cytokine levels and clinical features. Publications resulting from these analyses will include all Core Investigators submitting samples unless an investigator explicitly and in writing wishes to be excluded from authorship.