Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A multi-author clinical trial paper names the principal investigator as guarantor at submission. If a question later arises about a results section drafted primarily by a co-author, the guarantor -- not necessarily that co-author alone -- is the person accountable for confirming the work's overall integrity.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A corresponding author who only manages editorial correspondence, proofs, and post-publication queries is not automatically the guarantor: a journal may separately designate a different author (often the senior/PI author) as the person taking overall responsibility for the paper.
Editorial commentary
The guarantor concept traces to a 1997 proposal, later folded into ICMJE‘s contributorship discussions, for a named individual who signs off on the transparency and integrity of a submission as a whole — not just the specific tasks they personally performed. It predates, and is distinct from, the CRediT taxonomy’s task-level contributor roles.
BMJ’s requirement
BMJ requires submissions to identify a named guarantor — often, but not always, the corresponding author — as part of its author-transparency declaration. This operationalizes ICMJE’s baseline accountability principle into a specific submission field rather than leaving overall responsibility implicit. See CASRAI’s guide to BMJ’s authorship guidelines, guarantor requirement, and transparency declaration for the submission mechanics.
PNAS’s requirement
PNAS policy requires the corresponding author to serve as guarantor for a significant part, or all, of the work — layered on top of PNAS’s own legacy author-contributions checklist (Designed research / Performed research / Contributed new reagents or analytic tools / Analyzed data / Wrote the paper), which predates CRediT. See PNAS author contributions.
Guarantor vs. corresponding author vs. CRediT roles
These three are easy to conflate but answer different questions: corresponding author answers “who is the editorial contact point”; a CRediT role answers “what did this specific person do”; guarantor answers “who is accountable for the integrity of the whole paper.” The same person often holds more than one of these roles, but a journal that requires a named guarantor is asking a distinct question from either of the other two. See also Senior Author vs. Corresponding Author for a related but separate distinction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does every journal require a named guarantor?
No — it is a specific policy some journals (notably BMJ and PNAS) operationalize explicitly; many journals rely on ICMJE’s general accountability criterion without a dedicated guarantor field.
Can there be more than one guarantor?
Yes, particularly on large multi-site or multi-team studies, where a journal may accept co-guarantors each responsible for a defined part of the work, provided that division of responsibility is stated explicitly.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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"description": "The guarantor of a paper is the author (occasionally more than one, as co-guarantors) who takes explicit responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole -- from study conception through the accuracy and reporting of every result -- even for portions led by other co-authors. Several journals, including BMJ and PNAS, require submissions to name a guarantor explicitly; the role is distinct from authorship generally and from the corresponding-author role specifically.",
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"datePublished": "2026-08-22T10:44:43",
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