From the BIRN Cooperative Guidelines

Authorship:

• Summary: The guidelines for authorship are not completely consistent but do follow the general principle: Everyone who is listed as an author should have made a substantial, direct, intellectual contribution to the work. Everyone who has made other substantial contributions should be acknowledged.
• BIRN specific:
  1. Each research test bed will determine their own guidelines for substantial, direct intellectual guidelines.
  2. It is not compulsory to have test beds as co-authors, but where appropriate it is recommended.
  3. Manuscripts from all BIRN projects that are written to demonstrate the achievement of the stated Specific Aims of the initial grant proposals should include the appropriate test bed(s) as the final author with a URL that points to a BIRN web page giving the full list of contributing scientists and their corresponding institution. Note that since the composition of contributing scientists to any given BIRN test bed will change over time, it is expected that there will be more than one URL for each test bed and each will be labeled according to the time window for which it is appropriate to use. The one that corresponds to the active staff at the time the work was done will be used for each manuscript.

• Examples of BIRN generated publications (BIRN Investigators)
  1. Scientific manuscripts resulting from multi-site data analysis for BIRN Specific Aims using BIRN data.
  2. Scientific manuscripts resulting from multi-site data analysis using BIRN data, BIRN data analysis tools or methods not directly addressing BIRN specific aims.
  3. Scientific manuscripts covering the development and/or validation of methods for cross platform data acquisition, data correction, network infrastructure, multi-site image visualization, multi-site software data analysis tools, data base creation, data sharing, subject confidentiality, etc.
  4. Review articles dealing with the BIRN (no new findings)

Acknowledgements:

• All publications should acknowledge BIRN and other related grants using the formats given below. Any use of BIRN data resources (technology, software, and/or archived data) requires acknowledgement. Secondary use of archived imaging or other data requires acknowledgement of the sites where the data was collected, grant support information, identifying Principal Investigators, title of project that collected the data, preferably by citing the published work that describes the acquisition and primary analysis of the data. All publications should acknowledge all sites that contributed data to the work done in the manuscript.

• An example:
  • For Mouse BIRN: NIH Grant U24 RR021760 to the Mouse Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN, http://www.nbirn.net), that is funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
  • Whenever possible both acknowledgements and authorship should be made to the particular BIRN group generating the manuscript. Hence, the word Grant # would include the grant numbers associated with a particular area of research and GROUP above could be one of the following:
    • [list all four fund numbers], to have a global acknowledgement
    • [Mouse], for work developed mainly at Mouse BIRN
    • [FIRST], for work developed mainly at FIRST BIRN
    • [Brain Morphometry], for work developed mainly at Brain Morphometry
    • [Coordinating Center], for work developed mainly at BIRN CC