The paper is an excellent exposition of the causes and consequences of gift authorship practice not only in research on medical related issues but also in the entire academic domain in India. The authors and IJME is to be complimented for the same as the views carried in the article can act as sounding board against such culture which is needed at regular intervals to restrain researchers from being part of such offences. This article is an attempt to add two more additional kinds of gift authorship which is not mentioned in this particular paper.

First is the gift authorship in the name of foreign collaborative research sometimes involving fifty or even hundreds of researchers as authors within India and across the world, where role of some of the authors seems to be just restricted to providing empirical data from their country/ population or specific information from their work settings. A closer examination will show that a number of such authors who appears to be gifted with authorship have never published on related issues in their lifetime. The adherence to ICMJE criteria could have eliminated these authors from the publication. Most of collaborative research exercises involve multimillion dollars funding where the primary authors who drive these exercises are based in internationally reputed institutes abroad.

Second is the gift authorship in research involving family members including couples, children and other relatives. These researchers join together as a familial enterprise which drives the so called original research. Such researchers will be mostly affiliated to single or multiple research institutes in the country. It is to be added that most often these enterprises do take support from other researchers and they are often seen to be collaborating with the research initiative of reputed institutions from abroad mentioned above. Here academic research domain may not remain detached, in the era of dynasty domination in every sector ranging from business, politics, filmdom, sports etc. The concern here is the risk of gifting authorship in such settings where one could find the names of these relatives in various permutations and combination as authors in journals, enhancing their visibility in the domain under research.

This comment is neither against internationally funded multi-centric projects involving hundreds of researchers nor against research output produced by researchers in familial relationship or those engaged in both. The core issue is high risk of gift authorship in these two settings. Most often these research outputs especially the internationally driven research are published in high impact journals and those who were gifted authorship will have an edge over fellow researchers in India when it comes to career promotions, competition for research grants and bidding for research projects. The risk of such researchers claiming “subject expert” on the basis of gift authorship and their presence in national and subnational expert committees, evaluation panels and interview boards is a harm to scientific advancement in any country including India. All these issues will be redundant if those engaged in the above two kind of research models abide by ICMJE criteria. If not the ICMJE criteria needs to be adapted for application in similar settings to filter out such offences from the part of researchers.

• Affiliation: International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai
• Country: India