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Authorship and Contributorship

This guide provides researchers with a comprehensive overview of the ethical attribution of authors and other contributors. It covers the key frameworks and guidelines, including the ICMJE and CRediT systems, as well as the CSE and COPE standards.

Author affiliation identifies the institution where you conducted your research, and is typically listed directly below your name in an academic paper. Giving your affiliation serves multiple important functions and benefits both authors and institutions. As an author, it enhances your credibility, helps peers discover your research, and facilitates networking with other researchers. It also strengthens your professional reputation and ensures accurate citation tracking. For institutions, it provides deserved recognition for their research support. Most fundamentally, clear affiliation disclosure upholds research integrity and transparency, creating an accountable record of where and how research was conducted.

While frameworks like ICMJE, COPE, CSE, and CRediT establish ethical authorship standards, they offer no guidance on affiliation, Instead, affiliation is guided by academic publishers, 

The following section provides generally accepted guidelines and best practices for author affiliation disclosure. Because requirements vary by journal and discipline, always consult your target journal's submission guidelines.

Guidelines | Best Pratices

The most important principle in stating your affiliation is accurately naming the institution where you conducted the majority of your research, regardless of your current position. This practice ensures accurate credit attribution to the institution that supported your work, upholds accountability for research oversight and ethical approvals, and maintains transparency regarding funding sources and potential conflicts of interest.

For example, if you did all of your research at, say, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) before coming to Illinois Tech, then UIUC should be listed as your affiliation. Misrepresenting affiliation can constitute research misconduct by obscuring the true source of institutional support and distorting research attribution. Accurate affiliation listing preserves fairness, transparency, and institutional research record integrity.

Additional best practices include:

  • Use the full official institutional name, including department, city, and country, avoiding informal abbreviations (e.g., Illinois Institute of Technology instead of Illinois Tech or IIT; Departemtn of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering instead of MMAE).
  • Follow hierarchical order: institution, department or school, then geographic location. (e.g., Department of Biomedical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA).
  • Include multiple affiliations only when more than one institution contributed substantially—usually no moer than two, unless journal policies differ.
  • Clearly distinguish your affiliation (where you did your research) from your current institutional address, noting the latter separately if applicable.
  • Use superscript numbers or symbols to link authors and affiliations in multi-author papers.
  • Incorporate standardized identifiers such as Research Organization Registry (ROR) for institutions and ORCID for authors to improve accuracy and disambiguation.
  • Maintain consistent formatting across all authors and affiliations.
  • Cclosely folllow your journal's submission guidelines.
  • Verify all information before submission. Post-acceptance changes are difficult and time-consuming.