While much of the scholarly work on ethics relating to academic authorship examines the fair distribution of authorship credit, none has yet examined situations where a researcher contributes significantly to the project, but whose contributions do not make it into the final manuscript. Such a scenario is commonplace in collaborative research settings in many disciplines and may occur for a number of reasons, such as excluding research in order to provide the paper with a clearer focus, tell a particular story, or exclude negative results that do not fit the hypothesis. Our concern in this paper is less about the reasons for including or excluding data from a paper and more about distributing credit in this type of scenario. In particular, we argue that the notion ‘substantial contribution’, which is part of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) authorship criteria, is ambiguous and that we should ask whether it concerns what ends up in the paper or what is a substantial contribution to the research process leading up to the paper. We then argue, based on the principles of fairness, due credit, and ensuring transparency and accountability in research, that the latter interpretation is more plausible from a research ethics point of view. We conclude that the ICMJE and other organizations interested in authorship and publication ethics should consider including guidance on authorship attribution in situations where researchers contribute significantly to the research process leading up to a specific paper, but where their contribution is finally omitted.

虽然与学术作者身份相关的道德规范的许多学术著作都审查了作者署名的公平分配，但尚未审查研究人员对项目做出重大贡献但其贡献未纳入最终手稿的情况。这种情况在许多学科的合作研究环境中很常见，并且可能由于多种原因而发生，例如排除研究以便为论文提供更清晰的重点、讲述特定的故事或排除不符合要求的负面结果。假设。我们在本文中关注的不是在论文中包含或排除数据的原因，而是在这种情况下分配信用。特别是，我们认为“实质性贡献”这一概念是国际医学期刊编辑委员会（ICMJE）作者标准的一部分，它是含糊不清的，我们应该问它是否涉及论文的最终内容，或者涉及什么？对本文的研究过程做出了重大贡献。然后，我们认为，基于公平、应有的信用以及确保研究的透明度和问责制的原则，从研究伦理的角度来看，后一种解释更为合理。我们的结论是，ICMJE 和其他对作者身份和出版道德感兴趣的组织应考虑在研究人员对特定论文的研究过程做出重大贡献但其贡献最终被忽略的情况下纳入作者归属指南。