Summary of the WUR guidelines on authorship, citation and affiliation with respect to publishing research results.

Authorship guidelines at WUR

For the full Authorship, citation and affiliation guidelines, please see the attachment to this knowledge article. This article is a summary of the full guidelines document.

What is authorship?

Guidelines for authorship vary among disciplines. In general, authorship implies that a person has made a substantial contribution to at least two of the following research activities of a manuscript:
• initiation and design of the research
• data collection
• data analysis
• writing of the manuscript

Co-authorship

An author of a manuscript should have made a significant scientific contribution to the manuscript and should always share responsibility and accountability for the results reported. Lesser contributions by others should be listed in the acknowledgements, if applicable. An administrative relationship to a study or a role as supervisor or being responsible for the funding does not necessarily qualify a person for authorship. The submitting author should, at all times, send all co-authors the final draft of the manuscript and receive their approval before submission and publication of the work.

Many journals nowadays require the contributions of each author to be stated in the manuscript. The CRediT – Contribute Roles Taxonomy from Elsevier is now used by more than 1000 of their journals to identify 14 contributor roles in scientific scholarly output (https://casrai.org/credit/). Furthermore, journals may require an author to provide an ORCID iD. The ORCID iD is a unique identifier that distinguishes you and your work from other researchers and their work.

Order of the authors

For many disciplines at WUR, the first author is the person who has made the most important contribution. Co-authors can be ranked in order of decreasing importance of their contribution or in alphabetical order if their contributions were equal. The second or last author may be the second most important contributor, the direct supervisor or the research leader, depending on the discipline. Note that all supervisors and research leaders mentioned as co-authors should have made a substantial contribution to the manuscript in at least two of the above-mentioned activities.

Tips for managing authorship

• It is recommended, based on expected research activities, to agree early on in the research process on criteria and tasks for first authorship and the order of co-authors.
• Contributors should collectively decide on authorship and the order in which authors appear on the manuscript.
• In case of disagreement, unclarity or uncertainty about the authorship, consult the chair of the group, the research institute director or the PhD advisor of the relevant Graduate School.
• Clarify any issue or conflict regarding authorship before submitting a manuscript to a journal or a publisher. Adding or removing authors and changing the order of authors is often very difficult once a manuscript has been accepted for publication.

WUR author affiliations

As a WUR researcher, you are required to include the correct WUR affiliation in your research output. The correct and consistent use of the brand name in academic publications is essential for the visibility of WUR’s scientific output in major international citation databases as well as for your own personal visibility.

Improve the visibility of your research

Consistently using the same affiliation makes it easier for others to find your publications. It also makes your publications more likely to be included in your citation counts and other impact measures. Using the same WUR affiliation also enhances citation counts for Wageningen University & Research as a whole and positively affects its rank in the university rankings.

Guidelines for the correct use of your WUR affiliation

WUR researchers need to consider the WUR brand name policy. Wageningen University & Research has opted for a monolithic brand policy. This means: one brand and one logo.

The brand name Wageningen University & Research must always be used in the academic publications of:

• the university, in combination with the name of the chair group, or
• a research institute, in combination with the institute’s domain description.

How to use the name of your chair group?

Format:
Chair group, Wageningen University & Research

Use the name as it appears in this list of chair groups.

Examples:

• Food Chemistry, Wageningen University & Research
• Animal Production Systems, Wageningen University & Research
• Soil Biology, Wageningen University & Research
• Laboratory of Nematology, Wageningen University & Research
• Consumption and Healthy Lifestyles, Wageningen University & Research

How to use the name of your research institute?

Format:
Institute, Wageningen University & Research

Use the name as it appears in the list of domain descriptions (p.7 Brand policy guidelines), see also this list of research institutes.

Examples:

• Wageningen Economic Research, Wageningen University & Research
• Wageningen Food & Biobased Research, Wageningen University & Research

Affiliation use in relation to Open Access deals

Please check that the external affiliations are correct. To be eligible for WUR’s open access deals, the corresponding author must be affiliated with WUR and have a valid WUR email account at the time of publication. The corresponding author is, in most cases, seen as the author who submits the manuscript. Note that the manuscript may be published long after submission. If you are on a temporary contract (e.g. PhD, post-doc contract), make sure that somebody with a valid WUR account at the time of publication is the corresponding author.

Questions and support

Do you have questions about this service, or would you like personal support? Feel free to contact us. You can send an email to riis.library@wur.nl.