“I WAS ACKNOWLEDGED BUT I SHOULD BE AN AUTHOR”
Case
A person named in the acknowledgements of a paper wrote to the editor indicating that they had been in part responsible for the analysis and interpretation of the data and should therefore be named as an author.
From editor's reading of the correspondence between authors it seems that the primary author may have used the ideas of the “complainant” to some extent in that the focus of the published paper does take one of the lines of interpretation that the complainant had suggested (a line of interpretation that was not given prominence in the very first outline manuscript from the author that was originally shared with the complainant and that I have seen). The analysis presented in the published paper was slightly but not substantially different from one of a number that the complainant had earlier performed. The author insists that neither of these points is correct and that the complainant had no role in the formation of the paper but rather had suggested a different focus for the analysis/paper that they did not go on to take up.
Editor has not been able to broker an agreement between the two parties and he is not able to square their two separate accounts of what has happened over time, including claims that some emails pasted into Word documents had been altered. As such, this leaves he unable to confidently either reject or accept the complaint.
COPE advice
This is essentially an author dispute and the editor cannot be expected to adjudicate in this matter. It is not the role of editors to resolve authorship disputes. The paper should not be retracted. But the editor could publish a notice of disputed authorship. The advice was to write to the complainant explaining that this is a matter between him and the author, and that the complainant should take the matter up with the author’s institution if he so wishes. In future, it might be useful for editors to confirm that persons named in the acknowledgements sections are aware of the fact and agree to inclusion.
