# GeNext MedEd Foundation
## Authorship, Contribution & Publication Integrity Standard
**Document code:** GMEF-RES-AUTH-001  
**Version:** 1.0  
**Status:** Institutional working standard

### 1. Principle
Credit should reflect real scholarly contribution. Authorship, acknowledgements and contributor roles should be discussed early, documented transparently and reviewed when contributions change.

### 2. Contribution record
Projects should record contributions such as: concept/question development; methodology; protocol; data curation; investigation; clinical/site work; statistics/analysis; software/data tools; supervision; project administration; visualisation; writing-original draft; writing-review/editing; funding acquisition; and other material academic work.

### 3. Authorship decisions
Final authorship should follow the requirements of the target journal and accepted scholarly standards. Honorary, guest, coercive or ghost authorship should not be used. Individuals who contribute but do not meet authorship criteria should be acknowledged appropriately with permission where required.

### 4. Order and corresponding author
Author order and corresponding-author responsibility should be agreed using the actual contribution pattern and disciplinary norms, not seniority alone. Any change should be discussed and documented.

### 5. Multicentre and group work
For collaborative studies, site investigators, coordinating groups and writing groups should define contribution and publication expectations before major data collection where feasible. Group authorship may be used if supported by the target journal.

### 6. Conflicts, funding and disclosures
Relevant financial/non-financial interests, funding, material support and institutional relationships should be disclosed according to project, conference and journal requirements.

### 7. Integrity safeguards
Plagiarism, fabricated/falsified data, duplicate/redundant publication, undisclosed text recycling, inappropriate image manipulation and misleading attribution are inconsistent with Foundation academic standards.

### 8. Disputes
Contribution disagreements should first be addressed transparently within the project team. Unresolved concerns may be escalated to the appropriate academic/research governance group, while recognising that host institutions and journals retain their own authority.

### 9. Archive
The final publication citation, DOI/identifier, accepted contributor record and relevant disclosure history should be preserved with the project archive.