Do Medical Journals Provide Clear and Consistent Guidelines on Authorship?

Elizabeth Wager, MA

Introduction

A publication's list of authors or contributors tells readers who did the work, allows credit to be taken if it is good, and identifies those responsible if there are problems. It is therefore important that the listing is fair and accurate. It is not easy to estimate the frequency of authorship abuse, but a recent study of industry-sponsored trials found evidence of ghost authorship in 75% of papers.^[1]

Guidance about determining authorship is available from a number of organizations including the Committee on Publication Ethics^[2] and the Council of Science Editors.^[3] Perhaps the best known guidance comes from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) in its Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URM).^[4] However, the ICMJE criteria are not endorsed by all biomedical journals and are not universally known or accepted by researchers.^[5,6,7]

Since I was checking the Instructions to Authors of a large number of biomedical journals for another project, I decided to review their guidance about authorship to see whether journals' authorship policies were consistent with one another and with published criteria.

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Instructions to Contributors
No.	Instruction	Number of Journals (%)	Subgroups (%)
1	No guidance	100 (41)
2	Reference or link to ICMJE	26 (11)
2a	- current version^*		13 (6)
2b	- old version^†		9 (4)
2c	- vague wording		4 (2)
3	Uses ICMJE wording	25 (11)
3a	- current criteria^‡		16 (7)
3b	- old criteria^§		9 (4)
4	Paraphrases ICMJE	17 (7)
5	Own criteria	33 (14)
	Authors must approve paper	33 (14)
	Total	234
^**	Lists contributors	21 (9)

^* Refers to www.icmje.org; ^† refers to version published in 1997 (eg, Annals of Internal Medicine, Lancet, NEJM) or earlier; ^‡ criteria from post-2001 versions (includes "data acquisition" as qualifying activity); ^§ criteria from pre-2001 versions (before addition of "data acquisition"); ^** this category was not an exclusive one

Appendix 1

Authorship section of International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (revised 2003)

II.A Authorship and Contributorship

II.A.1. Byline Authors. An "author" is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study, and biomedical authorship continues to have important academic, social, and financial implications. In the past, readers were rarely provided with information about contributions to studies from those listed as authors and in acknowledgments. Some journals now request and publish information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in a submitted study, at least for original research. Editors are strongly encouraged to develop and implement a contributorship policy, as well as a policy on identifying who is responsible for the integrity of the work as a whole.

While contributorship and guarantorship policies obviously remove much of the ambiguity surrounding contributions, it leaves unresolved the question of the quantity and quality of contribution that qualify for authorship. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has recommended the following criteria for authorship; these criteria are still appropriate for those journals that distinguish authors from other contributors.

Authorship credit should be based 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. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.
When a large, multi-center group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship defined above and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict of interest disclosure forms. When submitting a group author manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and should clearly identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals will generally list other members of the group in the acknowledgements. The National Library of Medicine indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript.
Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.
All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

Some journals now also request that one or more authors, referred to as "guarantors," be identified as the persons who take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article, and publish that information.

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.

The order of authorship on the byline should be a joint decision of the co-authors. Authors should be prepared to explain the order in which authors are listed.

II.A.2. Contributors Listed in Acknowledgments

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.

Groups of persons who have contributed materially to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be listed under a heading such as "clinical investigators" or "participating investigators," and their function or contribution should be described - for example, "served as scientific advisors," "critically reviewed the study proposal," "collected data," or "provided and cared for study patients."

Because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions, all persons must give written permission to be acknowledged.

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