Study for the CMPP by treating each publication decision as a two-step question: first identify which framework applies (ICMJE, GPP 2022, journal policy, congress policy), then walk the decision tree inside that framework. Memorized definitions fail when two frameworks overlap; a practiced decision path handles the overlap and the edge cases.
Authorship versus acknowledgment: two different decision paths
Treat authorship and acknowledgment as separate trees. Authorship requires meeting all ICMJE criteria; acknowledgment credits contribution without accountability. Confusing the two paths produces both guest and ghost authorship errors.
The ICMJE framework sets four authorship criteria: substantial contribution to the work's conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation; drafting or critically revising the manuscript; final approval of the version to be published; and accountability for all aspects of the work. All four must be met — meeting one or two is insufficient. Accountability deserves special attention in your study: it means the person accepts responsibility and confidence in the work, which is why final approval alone never qualifies someone.
The acknowledgment path credits people who contributed but do not meet all criteria — for example, someone who provided data collection support or general supervision. Professional medical writing support can sit on either path: a writer who drafted and revised the manuscript and accepts accountability may meet the criteria; a writer who only edited language typically does not. In either case, the byline decision should be documented, agreed by everyone named, and disclosed, including funding of writing support.
- Authorship decision: does the person meet all four ICMJE criteria, not just one?
- Acknowledgment decision: is the contribution real, specific, and described accurately?
- Disclosure decision: is writing support and its funding declared regardless of path?
| Contributor profile (simplified example) | Authorship candidate? | Usual route | Decision rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statistician who performed and interpreted the analyses | Often yes | Author if they also revised, approved, and accept accountability | Analysis and interpretation are named ICMJE contributions |
| Professional writer who drafted and revised sections at sponsor request | Possible | Author if all four criteria are met; otherwise acknowledged | Role, not job title, determines the path; funding must be disclosed either way |
| Site coordinator who enrolled participants only | No | Acknowledgment or supplementary contributor list | Data acquisition alone, without drafting, approval, and accountability, is incomplete |
| Executive who requested 'visibility' on the paper without substantive input | No | Neither; declining the request with rationale | Adding an unqualified name is guest authorship |
What GPP 2022 adds on top of ICMJE guidance
GPP 2022 adapts authorship and transparency principles to company-sponsored research. Compare it with ICMJE line by line: it extends the same core criteria while adding sponsor-role transparency, writing-support disclosure, and broader research types.
GPP 2022 is a good-publication-practice guideline developed for company-sponsored biomedical research, and its scope reaches beyond traditional drug trials to areas such as devices and real-world evidence. Where ICMJE guidance speaks to journals and researchers generally, GPP 2022 speaks directly to the commercial setting: it addresses how sponsor involvement should be transparent, how professional medical writing support should be declared, and how patients and other stakeholders may participate in communication of research.
A productive study method is a two-column comparison. For each ICMJE concept — authorship criteria, conflicts of interest, registration, data sharing — ask what GPP 2022 says in the sponsored-research context and note the addition. For example, industry-sponsored papers conventionally state the sponsor's role in study design, analysis, and the decision to submit, and GPP 2022 reinforces that transparency rather than treating it as an optional courtesy. Writing the comparison yourself, from the actual guideline text, fixes the distinctions far better than reading summaries.
Publication planning: congress output versus journal manuscript
Plan each data set through its full communication lifecycle. Congress abstracts, posters, and full manuscripts serve different audiences and carry different disclosure and duplication rules, so sequence them deliberately instead of treating each output in isolation.
A publication plan typically maps a study's data to outputs over time: a congress abstract, a poster or oral presentation, then a full manuscript in a peer-reviewed journal. Each format has its own submission rules, disclosure requirements, and timing constraints, and each is judged by different review bodies. A frequent study exercise is to take a hypothetical trial and decide, for each result, which format fits the audience, the maturity of the analysis, and the message — and to write the rationale, because the rationale is what scenario questions test.
The trap in planning questions is overlap. Presenting an interim analysis at a congress while a manuscript of the final analysis is under review can be perfectly legitimate, but the two outputs must be clearly distinguished, and journal policies differ on citing and disclosing congress material. When you study, check each hypothetical against both the congress framework and the target journal's framework, and practice writing one short justification sentence per output. That sentence habit is directly reusable in scenario-style questions.
Duplicate publication, salami slicing, and acceptable secondary publication
Distinguish three situations: duplicate (redundant) publication, salami slicing of one study into thin papers, and legitimate secondary or co-publication. The dividing lines are disclosure, new content, and transparency about where each piece has appeared.
Duplicate publication means substantially the same work appears in more than one venue without transparent cross-referencing, and it distorts the record because readers may count one finding as several. Salami slicing means dividing a coherent body of work into the smallest publishable fragments, which multiplies papers without adding insight — a publication-plan integrity failure, not merely a stylistic one. Both are distinct from preprints, which are openly labeled early versions and are generally handled through disclosure of preprint status at submission, subject to each journal's policy.
ICMJE-type guidance recognizes that secondary publication can sometimes serve the public interest — for example, reaching a different audience or co-publishing across regions — but it attaches conditions: informing the editors of prior or parallel publication, cross-referencing the versions, and ensuring the secondary version is clearly identified as such. In your study, practice classifying one-paragraph paper vignettes into duplicate, sliced, preprint, or legitimate secondary publication, and write the condition that decides each. Speed in that classification is a concrete, checkable skill.
Worked scenario: the requested 'guest' on a manuscript byline
A sponsor executive requests a byline after the paper is drafted. The defensible move is to test the request against the four ICMJE criteria, document the outcome, and offer an acknowledgment or a substantive role instead of silent compliance.
Scenario: a manuscript on a company-sponsored phase study is ready for author approval. A regional business lead who attended project meetings but contributed no conception, analysis, drafting, or revision asks to be added 'for visibility.' A plausible mistake is to add the name to avoid friction — that is guest authorship, and it also weakens the paper's credibility with journals that request contributor statements. A second mistake is silently refusing without documenting the reasoning, which creates a repeat request on the next paper.
The better decision applies the criteria explicitly: check each of the four against the executive's actual contributions, record the assessment, and respond with an alternative — an acknowledgment with a specific description, or, if the executive genuinely wants authorship, a defined substantive role such as critically reviewing the manuscript and accepting accountability, which then must be real. This matters because byline integrity is not a courtesy issue; journals and good-publication-practice guidance treat accurate contributorship as part of transparency, and a paper's disclosure section should withstand an audit.
Worked scenario: splitting one trial into three 'least publishable' papers
A team proposes three thin papers from one trial. The defensible move is to re-plan as one primary manuscript plus clearly justified, non-redundant secondary outputs, each disclosing its relationship to the parent paper.
Scenario: a randomized trial yields a primary efficacy outcome, a patient-reported-outcomes analysis, and a subgroup finding. A plausible mistake is publishing three minimally different papers within a short window, each presenting the same methods and baseline table, with no cross-references — salami slicing that fragments the record. A subtler mistake is the opposite: assuming the PRO analysis and subgroup finding can never be separate papers, when genuinely distinct questions with their own analyses can warrant separate, transparent publications.
The better decision re-frames the plan around content, not count. Publish the primary paper first; route the PRO analysis as a distinct secondary paper that discloses the parent publication and states its own question; and evaluate the subgroup finding honestly — if it is hypothesis-generating with a small sample, a congress poster with clear caveats may be the appropriate output rather than a standalone manuscript. This matters because classification skill — redundant versus legitimate secondary output — is exactly the kind of layered judgment that scenario-style study questions reward, and the same reasoning transfers to congress abstracts.
A study sequence and self-check rubric for CMPP readiness
Build a sequence that moves from frameworks to application: read the core guidance, then drill classification and drafting exercises weekly. Use the rubric below as a milestone check, not as a prediction of any passing standard.
A workable sequence: first, read the ICMJE authorship and overlapping-publication guidance and GPP 2022 closely enough to summarize each section in one sentence of your own. Second, spend a week classifying contributor profiles and paper vignettes, as in the scenarios above. Third, practice drafting disclosure statements — writing support, sponsor role, prior presentation — in three sentences or fewer. Fourth, take a full practice set under timing, then review every missed item by naming which framework governed it. Administrative details such as exam windows and application steps change, so confirm those directly with ISMPP rather than from memory.
Self-check rubric (learning milestones, not passing predictions): score yourself one point each, for a maximum of five. You can list the four ICMJE criteria without prompting. Given five contributor profiles, you assign author, acknowledgment, or neither with a written rationale for each. You can explain, in two sentences, how GPP 2022 differs in scope from ICMJE guidance. Given a vignette, you classify duplicate, sliced, preprint, or legitimate secondary publication and name the deciding condition. You can draft a compliant writing-support disclosure from a short case fact pattern. Five out of five suggests the scenario-level reasoning the credential's body of knowledge emphasizes; anything lower tells you which framework to reread.
References and further reading
Use these references to explore the concepts and check the latest information from the relevant organizations.