A nesthesiology periodically updates our Instructions to Authors and communicates the changes broadly. This Editorial aims to provide brief summaries, background information, justifications, and applicability of the Journal policy updates, which are effective with this issue. These updates address the importance of recognizing the role of collaborators in research and mechanisms in Anesthesiology for doing so, qualifications for authorship in Anesthesiology, unacceptable types of authorship, salami publication versus appropriate use of segmented publication, acceptability of limited text recycling, and other elements of scientific integrity.
Authorship: What Counts, Who Counts, Who Cares?Appropriate recognition for contributions to basic, clinical, and population research is an important aspect of scholarly publication. Anesthesiology strongly endorses the practice of appropriately crediting contributions to research publications toward the goals of giving proper recognition, fairness, and transparency for authors and readers, ensuring contemporary Journal best practices, and clarity of communication. Anesthesiology has for years provided multiple ways to offer appropriate credit on articles and communicate that credit through commensurate means of attribution and will continue to do so.What constitutes authorship is one of the most vexing problems in contemporary scholarly publishing, in part because there are no universal definitional standards of authorship. The sine qua non of authorship is a substantial intellectual contribution. Authorship denotes credit. Equally important is that authorship also denotes responsibility and accountability. Authorship credit and accountability are inseparable. Authorship is one form of credit, but other forms are more appropriate for work done that does not include all the necessary elements of authorship.Scholarly publications serve a dual purpose-one for which they were created and the other an unintended byproduct. The former is scientific communication, and the latter is use by institutions for assessment and reward. 1 Authorship is used in science to communicate research findings to peers and the public, denote credit and responsibility, document personal accomplishment, and advance careers, while it is used outside science by institutions whose interests often differ, such as for promotion and tenure processes, metrics of faculty productivity, and ranking institutional programs and reputations. 2,3 In both embodiments, communication and academia, authorship is "the currency of the political economy of scientific practice." 4 That primary currency of scientific credit ("coin of the realm") is reward assigned through peer Image: None (Journal icon).