Authorship Criteria

EBGC follows the authorship guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), adapted for research in economics, business, and government. Authorship gives credit to people who made a real contribution to the work and who are accountable for it.

1. Who Qualifies as an Author

A person listed as an author must meet all four of the following criteria:

  1. made a substantial contribution to the idea or design of the study, or to the collection, analysis, or interpretation of data;
  2. wrote the manuscript or revised it critically for important intellectual content;
  3. approved the final version to be published; and
  4. agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including its accuracy and integrity.

2. Contributors Who Are Not Authors

People who only provided funding, general supervision, administrative support, language editing, help with data collection, or access to data do not qualify as authors. With their permission, they should be thanked in the Acknowledgements section.

3. Author Contribution Statement

Every manuscript must include an Author Contributions statement describing the role of each author. EBGC recommends the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), for example: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, data curation, writing – original draft, and writing – review and editing.

4. Corresponding Author

  • The corresponding author handles all communication with the journal during submission, review, and publication.
  • The corresponding author confirms that all co-authors have read and approved the final manuscript and agree to its submission, and that the author list is complete and correct.
  • All authors are encouraged to register an ORCID iD and include it in the submission.

5. Changes to Authorship

  • The list and order of authors should be final at the time of submission.
  • Adding, removing, or reordering authors after submission requires a written request from the corresponding author explaining the reason, signed by all authors, including any author being removed.
  • After a manuscript has been accepted, changes to authorship are not allowed, except in exceptional cases approved by the Editor-in-Chief.

6. Unacceptable Practices

  • Gift or guest authorship (listing people who did not contribute) and ghost authorship (leaving out people who did contribute) are not allowed.
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) tools cannot be listed as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work. Any use of AI must be disclosed according to the journal’s AI Policy.

7. Authorship Disputes

Authorship disputes should be resolved by the authors and their institutions. EBGC will pause the processing of the manuscript and follow COPE guidance, but the journal does not decide authorship disputes itself. See also the Allegations of Misconduct policy.