Acknowledgments and Authorship

Acknowledgment of scientific, techinical, and financial support by the FGCZ. Minimal acknowledgment of support is the mentioning of the FGCZ as a center or the individual staff in the acknowledgment section of resulting publications. Scientific contributions of FGCZ staff during the conceptual phase of the project, the generation of experimental data, or data evaluation and interpretation shall be acknowledged by including the FGCZ staff in the authorship of resulting publications and reports. In order to enable the FGCZ to document its contribution to research projects at UZH and ETH, please forward citations to publications involving work at the FGCZ tocoordinator at fgcz.ethz.ch.

Taken from the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) website:

Important reasons for acknowledging contributions from services facilities in publications, by co-authorship or by formal mention in the acknowledgments section, include:
1. Service facility personnel are scientists. When we make a substantial intellectual and/or experimental contribution to a study leading to a publication(s), just like any of your other collaborators deserve and expect to be included as co-author(s).

2. The existence of core facilities depends in part on proper acknowledgment in publications. This is an important metric of the value of most service facilities. Proper acknowledgment of service facilities enables us to obtain financial and other support so that we may continue to provide these essential services in the best ways possible. It also helps service personnel to advance in their careers, adding to the overall health of the facility.

The ABRF recommendation was previously published in Angeletti et al. in 1999 (FASEB Journal, 13:595), “Intellectual interactions between resource and research scientists are essential to the success of each project. When this success results in publication, a citation in the acknowledgments section of a manuscript may be appropriate for routine analysis. However, contributions from resource scientists that involve novel resource laboratory work and insight, experimental design, or advanced data analysis that make a publication possible or significantly enhance its value require co-authorship”

Activities for which authorship are recommended:
–Author should make substantive contributions to the project

– Conception, design of project, critical input, or original ideas

– Acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, beyond routine practices

– Draft the article or revise it critically for intellectual content

– Write a portion of the paper

– Intellectual contribution

– Final authority for the approval of article

– Each author should have participated enough to accept responsibility for the content of the manuscript

The following activities do not represent intellectual contributions to a project and would not constitute authorship:

– Providing funding (e.g. grant administrator or financial donor who had no intellectual input)

– Collection of data (technical skill but not involved in interpretation of data)

– General supervision of research group, but no intellectual input into the project