The Declaration of Helsinki is the main ethical code adopted globally to guide research in human beings, and in one of its latest reviews it included the duty by research staff to make the outcomes of their studies available to the public, being responsible for the integrity and accuracy of their reports. This is an ethical obligation that must be also undertaken by other agents in their areas of competence, such as research sponsors or scientific journal editors. According to article 36 of said declaration, the publication must also mention the source of funding, the affiliations of its authors, as well as any potential conflicts of interest. In case these principles are not met, research articles should not be accepted for publication.

The Code of Conduct for the Nursing Professional compels professionals to respect the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, as well as those regulating ethics in scientific publication. Let’s go deeper into these ethical principles and their origins.

In the past, approximately since 1930 and until 1970 (1), the mean number of authors in an article was two. Since the 70s, multi-authoring has been rapidly increasing until it has reached an unprecedented level. The main reason for this is probably the reward (or punishment) system established in the academic world, which is being clearly represented by the aphorism “to publish or to perish”. The publication of scientific articles in journals with the highest impact factor possible has become the main yardstick for research and/or academic staff who want to progress in their career. On the other hand, the collaboration between multiple teams is often necessary in order to conduct studies with large sample sizes, and it is facilitated more than ever by continuous technological advances.

It has become increasingly more frequent to find publications with tens of persons as authors, and in some cases even hundreds. We can discuss whether this is ethical or not, but we should review authorship criteria in order to do it. Let’s remember that the authorship of a scientific article confers credit; that is to say, it acknowledges the action conducted by those signing it, and this can have major social and academic consequences; but it also involves that those signing the published articles are accepting responsibility for their contents.

Organizations such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) have set forward a series of recommendations with periodic updates (2) in order to supervise the most adequate practice and ethical standards during the preparation of the report with the research outcomes and other materials published in the Health Sciences scientific journals. These recommendations, endorsed by an increasing number of prestigious biomedical journals, state the four following authorship criteria: a substantial contribution to the concept or design of the article or to data collection, analysis or interpretation; involvement in the design of the research paper or in the critical review of its intellectual contents; approval of the final version of the article, and responsibility, in the sense of having the ability to answer in order to ensure the accuracy or integrity of the article.

In order to be considered an author, the person must meet all and each of these four criteria and, therefore, anyone meeting them must be identified as such. It is important to point out that all those persons who have met the first criterion should have the opportunity to move forward towards the following steps and, therefore, to be considered in their research team for authorship. Having this knowledge can empower nursing professionals who, having met the requirements mentioned, can provide the arguments needed to be included in the authorship of articles prepared by multidisciplinary teams, in case they have not been considered for it. On the other hand, those persons who only meet some of the criteria must be mentioned in the Acknowledgments section; this must be confirmed by the authors with the acknowledged persons before submitting the manuscript for publication.

In recent years, many journals have started to encourage, and some others to demand, not only authorship criteria following the ICMJE or other recommendations, but also that the teams state who did what in the preparation of the article. In order to make this task easier, it has been suggested to make a transition in the concept of authorship towards attribution, contribution, collaboration and credit, as a clear and unequivocal vocabulary to describe what each person has done in a project (3).

The CRediT (Contributor Role Taxonomy) was developed in 2014; even though it does not adapt well to all research projects, it can be considered helpful for transparency, particularly in articles with multiple authorship, and it is already being required by hundreds of journals. CRediT defines fourteen types of contribution that a person can make to a manuscript, from developing the research protocol to collecting or analysing data, the writing process, the supervision, or even the project coordination or securing funding support.

This is not an easy task; and therefore, some initiatives have recently appeared to help with it. Tenzing (4) is a web application https://rollercoaster.shinyapps.io/tenzing/ named after the sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who was the first, alongside Edmund Hillary, to reach the summit of Mount Everest, but who received less recognition for the expedition than his British colleague, whose life he saved. This consists in a shared Google spreadsheet (http://bit.ly/tenzingTemplate). For each research Project, the names of the research staff are entered in the rows, and the fourteen CRediT categories in each of the columns, which can be marked according to their contribution to the research. At the end, Tenzing generates a brief report stating who has done what, and this text can be included in the section required by scientific journals.

Finally, I would like to highlight the recent challenges faced by research ethics, without having yet solved many of the most traditional conflicts. On this occasion I am referring to ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pretrained), a linguistic model based on artificial intelligence, which had over 100 million users after its launch in November 2022, turning it into the consumer application with the fastest growth in history.

Some prominent journals are expressing their opposition to accepting articles generated or aided by artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT (5). Their justification is based on the defence that authorship should be limited to human beings who generate creative, personal and intellectual contributions; besides, it is difficult to verify all the inaccuracies in ChatGPT, which might compromise the integrity of the publication.

From both my roles as researcher and as lecturer of the subject Ethics of Care in the Nursing Degree, I am concerned about the ethical approach of this new technological advance, which I sense has come here to stay. That is why I put forward a final reflection from the point of view of the responsibility concept. We professionals, as persons who are part of a profession and not a trade, have a moral commitment with said profession, based on awareness, freedom and responsibility. I consider that the training for conducting this action with responsibility, which must be taught and encouraged since the start of the Degree studies, will be the basis of solutions for present and future challenges which professional ethics will face, including the publication ethics.