Deciphering the authorship code☆
Article Outline
Abstract
[Callaham ML, Waeckerle JF. Deciphering the authorship code. Ann Emerg Med . April 2001;37:386-388.]
Beginning with our July 2001 issue, Annals will ask its authors to clarify their contributions and to take responsibility for their papers, in new ways. Although some authors may think we do this in an excess of bureaucratic zeal or simply to follow the precedent of other leading journals, we have better reasons.
The purpose of listing authors’ names on a manuscript is twofold. One intent is to give credit where it is due for the innovations and contributions of researchers. An equally important purpose is to clearly label who is responsible for the quality, accuracy, and ethics of the work, and to whom we and you may turn for answers on these topics (and details of the research) not included in the manuscript.
Editors and scholars have long argued that scientific authorship as presently assigned does not achieve either of these goals well. Some authors are listed who did not make significant contributions (“honorary” authors, listed for usually political reasons rather than any intellectual contribution to the scientific project), and other individuals who made significant contributions are not listed. The latter can be researchers who are omitted from authorship by accident or design, as well as “ghost” authors who are paid by commercial interests to write a paper to which the name of someone illustrious in the field is then attached.1 Both of these practices are common in medicine. Also increasingly common is the phenomenon whereby all authors claim full credit when praise is due, but when something goes wrong, suddenly and inexplicably no one is responsible.
Among the many people who participate in some manner in a typical research project, who is entitled to credit as an author? The only answer to that question was first formulated in 1985 by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), a self-appointed body of editors of large medical journals. They currently define authorship as follows (http://www.icmje.org/index.html#authorship ):
…Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.…
Authorship credit should be based only on: (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship.
Increasingly, authorship of multicenter trials is attributed to a group. All members of the group who are named as authors should fully meet the above criteria for authorship. Group members who do not meet these criteria should be listed, with their permission, in the Acknowledgments or in an appendix (see Acknowledgments).
A moment’s reflection leads to the conclusion that these criteria are limited, that they exclude many contributors to contemporary clinical research, and that few author credits in any journal comply with them. A study of the actual contributions described by authors published in The Lancet , one of the world’s top medical journals, revealed that 44% of listed authors did not meet these criteria for authorship.2 Most researchers do not agree with the Vancouver criteria, which were drafted by editors.3 They are, in fact, given lip service in most journals, and enforced in none.
Even when all authors are given credit as authors, and all have made genuine contributions, the list of names under the title of an article tells the reader little about who did what. This might not matter if the order of authorship were not so important for intellectual credit, academic promotion, and grants. Under the current system, the only means of communicating the magnitude of a contribution is the sequence in which the authors are listed. Most readers probably believe that the first author makes one of the largest contributions and is in charge of the overall manuscript, but there are no written rules in this regard. In some disciplines, being last is the position for the most senior author or the head of the laboratory. In others, it means you made the least contributions. Although many academicians would say that the sequence in some way reflects the magnitude of the contribution from greatest to least, there is no written or commonly accepted convention. Eighty-two percent of journal editors polled did not know the meaning of author sequence in their own journals, and medical school deans disagreed about the significance of the sequence and could not interpret it for purposes of assigning academic credit.4
How to improve this situation? Our current model of scientific authorship seems, curiously, to be derived from European novels of previous centuries, typically authored by only 1 person and felt to have sprung like Athena fully formed from the minds of their creators. However, contemporary science is performed not by an individual working in solitude in a wood-paneled study, but usually by a work team, a task force, or a large committee. Many people in many job descriptions are involved, and their contributions are complex and often highly technical. Many of these contributions would never fit the classic definition of biomedical authorship, but the study could not have been completed without them. In all of these regards, a contemporary research paper more closely resembles a committee report or a motion picture release, rather than a work of fiction or a textbook. That being the case, the solution might be to abandon the classic notion of “authorship” and rely instead on “contributors,” who could have many and varied roles. As with those other forms of collaboration, their roles and contributions could be described in the credits.
We are taking a step in that direction with our new policy. We will now request authors of original research to briefly describe their specific individual contributions. We have defined those roles a bit more generously than the ICMJE, and only state that authorship should require a substantial intellectual contribution of some kind to the project. We leave it to the authors to fill in the details, which we will publish with each article. A helpful taxonomy of possible contributions has been compiled by Yank and Rennie.2 Authors wishing further examples of how such credits might be listed are referred to the instructions for authors in journals such as JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, The Lancet , and BMJ . For example, a typical description of a multicenter clinical trial might be as follows:
MBK, BD, and NT conceived the study, designed the trial, and obtained research funding. MBK, BD, ML, and NT supervised the conduct of the trial and data collection. EW, SF, and MG undertook recruitment of participating centers and patients and managed the data, including quality control. NT and BD provided statistical advice on study design and analyzed the data; ML chaired the data oversight committee. BD drafted the manuscript, and all authors contributed substantially to its revision. MBK takes responsibility for the paper as a whole.
Only 86 words and no speculation needed to determine who did what. This new approach will give more accurate credit to contributors and better apprise the reader of their roles and responsibilities. It won’t be perfect and it won’t eliminate all ambiguity, but it will be a step in the right direction.
References
- . Authorship! Authorship! Guests, ghosts, grafters, and the two-sided coin [editorial; comment] [see comments]. JAMA. 1994;271:469–471
- . Disclosure of researcher contributions: a study of original research articles in The Lancet. Ann Intern Med. 1999;130:661–670
- . When authorship fails. A proposal to make contributors accountable [see comments] [published erratum appears in JAMA. 1998;279:22]. JAMA. 1997;278:579–585
- . Rating authors’ contributions to collaborative research: the PICNIC survey of university departments of pediatrics. CMAJ. 1996;155:877–882
☆ Reprints not available from the authors.
PII: S0196-0644(01)30945-9
doi:10.1067/mem.2001.114202
© 2001 American College of Emergency Physicians. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
