Ghost authorship

Ghost authorship and gift authorship are opposite failures of the same rule: the ICMJE authorship criteria, which require a listed author to have made a substantive contribution to conception/design or data acquisition/analysis/interpretation, to have drafted or critically revised the work, to have approved the final version, and to be accountable for it. Ghost authorship omits someone who meets that bar; gift authorship credits someone who does not. Both distort the public record of who actually did the work and who is accountable for it, and both are treated by publishers as authorship misconduct rather than a stylistic preference.

The paradigm case is industry-sponsored clinical research: a professional medical writer, often employed or contracted by the study sponsor, produces the first draft and substantial portions of the analysis narrative, but is left off the byline entirely and unnamed even in the acknowledgements. This differs from declared medical-writing assistance, which ICMJE and the Good Publication Practice (GPP 2022) framework explicitly permit provided the writer’s role and funding source are disclosed — disclosure, not the presence of professional writing help itself, is what separates a legitimate contribution from ghost authorship.

COPE’s flowchart for suspected ghost, guest, or gift authorship in a submitted manuscript (see CASRAI’s walkthrough of that flowchart) directs editors to suspend review, request a written authorship declaration and a description of each contributor’s role, and, where a ghost author is identified, secure written agreement from all parties before the manuscript proceeds. Editors are told to consider (not require) referring senior authors to their institution’s research-governance office.

Ghost authorship differs from other authorship-integrity failures it is sometimes confused with: it is not the same as an unresolved authorship dispute between people who are all named on the manuscript, and it is not itself a form of duplicate publication or salami slicing, though a ghost-authored paper produced to manufacture publication volume for an unlisted sponsor can co-occur with either. CRediT’s contributor-role taxonomy and mandatory contribution statements, now required by most major publishers, are the main structural defence: naming every contributor’s specific role makes an unlisted substantial contributor harder to conceal.

For the practical question of who was left off and why, see CASRAI’s guides on types of authorship in research and resolving authorship order disputes, and the ghost authorship vs. gift authorship comparison for a side-by-side of detection signals and remedies.