Medical and scientific authorship: a conflict between discipline rules and the law

When the results of medical collaborations are to be published, questions of authorship arise. Which members of the research team are to be acknowledged as authors of the paper? In what order are they to be acknowledged? Institutional rules will generally determine the attribution of authorship to members of the research team. However those rules are most unlikely to be consistent with the legal rules governing authorship and its attribution, most of which will apply regardless of a team’s adherence to institutional rules. This article examines the meaning of authorship in the medical community, and in the legal community under the copyright laws. It considers various formulations of the institutional rules governing authorship, as well as editorial practices. Through consideration of a hypothetical scenario, the consequences of the disparity between authorship norms in law and in medicine are elaborated.