Authorship

CCORDA guidelines to acknowledge our statisticians 

CCORDA follows the policy for authorship set forth by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and also recommended in published guidelines (Parker RA, Berman NG: Criteria for authorship for statisticians in medical papers.

Statistics in Medicine 17: 2289-2299 (1998)), “The basis of financial support should be the time/effort spent on a project and the basis for authorship should be whether the statistician has made a scientific contribution to the project."

CCORDA lists the following as examples of scientific contributions: 

• The statistician participated in the conception and design of the study (e.g., developing the analysis plan is a substantial contribution to the study design). 
• The statistician performed data analysis along with interpretation of results. 
• The statistician developed new statistical methods and/or combined existing techniques in a novel manner to meet the needs of the project. 
• The statistician took part in writing the manuscript/abstract (e.g., prepared the methods section on data analysis or assisted in the interpretation and presentation of results to maintain statistical integrity). 
• The statistician reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript/abstract before submission.

MS and Ph.D. statisticians should not be listed under acknowledgments if any of the above criteria have been met but should be appropriately recognized with authorship. An agreement should be reached early in the collaboration between the investigator and statistician regarding the authorship of the resulting manuscript/abstract.