Guidelines for coauthorship

The Swedish Sociological Association has produced guidelines for determinining authorship when coauthoring. The full guidelines are available at the Swedish version of this page.

Who should be considered author of scientific publications?

To be considered an author, one should (1) have contributed to the publication to a considerable degree, for example through being responsible for its fundamental idea, design, data collection, data treatment, theory development, analysis, or interpretation. One should furthermore have (2), alone or together with others, written the original manuscript and/or to a considerable extent participated in revision work with contributions of a scientific nature. One should furthermore (3) have authorised the final version of the publication, and finally (4) be able and prepared to publicly defend the publication and its results. Only a person who fulfills these conditions shall be considered an author. Anyone who has substantially contribruted to the publication, but nor enough to be considered an author, should be mentioned in the acknowledgements.

Special circumstances that does not qualify for authorship

In judging whether someone should be considered the auther of a publication, it is consequently not a merit to (1) as supervisor or responsibe for research grants support the project economically or otherwise, (2) to contribute with routine technical or administrative work, (3) to share data used in the publication, (4) contributing with language editing, or (5) to give general advise to the authors of the publication.

Author order

If there are multiple authors, the authors themselves decide on the order of authors. First author should be the one who have contributed the most, and so on. Alphabetical order should be used if the contribution has been equal (this could also be mentioned in a footnote).