Authorship guidelines
GOC publications: Author Guidelines
The GOC is a large and distributed group with multiple contributors and concurrent threads of development. In addition to the main NHGRI U41 grant, other funding lines support specific GOC activities and projects. Our program covers many aspects of research informatics including data integration, tool development, curation of molecular and genomic information, knowledge visualization, and community support. Our collective publication record is robust and growing. Here we detail guidelines for authorship in GOC publications.
- Publications that include authors funded by GOC U41 grant need to put funding source in Acknowledgements. The following text is recommended:
“The Gene Ontology is funded by NIH NHGRI grant U41 002273 to multi-Pis Judith A Blake, J. Michael Cherry, Christopher J. Mungall, Paul Thomas and Paul Sternberg."
- Papers with GOC-funded authors, whether or not a GO PI is an author, need sign-off from go-tops.
- Papers from other members of the GO Consortium (non GOC-funded) are also encouraged to share their manuscript with go-tops prior to submission.
- In this case you may acknowledge the consortium as follows: "We thank the many biocurators, editors and other members of the GO Consortium who have contributed to the annotation of dementia-relevant gene products and the development of the Gene Ontology, especially xxxx." (for example)
- Authorship is best discussed at the start of a project, with expected first and last authors on any projected papers discussed with those working on the project.
- Particularly with projects detailing work on a specific aspect of biology (such as apoptosis), it is important to consider including as authors all developers and curators who contributed to the specific project.
- Papers such as the GOC paper in the NAR special database issue in Jan, that include work from all active GOC funded people, are authored as ‘The Gene Ontology Consortium’ with a contributing author, and the list of all active Consortium members included at the end of the document.