What Constitutes Authorship?

ACS AuthorUniversity, Episode 10
What Constitutes Authorship?

Over the past several years, the number of coauthors on papers has been increasing. Papers with large numbers of coauthors are increasingly common, with the number of papers sporting more than 50 coauthors increasing from about 200 a year in 1990 to about 1,400 in 2014.. But with increasing co-authorships, comes additional concerns about who should receive credit for what. It is the responsibility of the submitting author to report authorship and contributions fairly. However, it’s not always abundantly clear who should be an author and who should be mentioned in the acknowledgement section. Watch this video to hear ACS Editors weigh in on what constitutes authorship.

You might also like:

Produced by the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences.

[prabirsaha]

Certainly, I do not completely agree to Dr. Bradley Smith's opinion saying "Without the contribution, would it still be published?"

Some project have lower intellectual/concept development and higher mechanical labour in form of performing experiments, gathering huge amounts of data, analyzing them and further refining.

Say 4 people worked on a project and pinned it down within 2 months. Now, lets take out 2 people, and ask the same question "Without their contribution, would it still be published?"
Yeah, it might be or would be, but in 5-6 months.

In that case, won't you give authorship to those 2 people?