ArticleMedGenMed : Medscape general medicine2007
Do medical journals provide clear and consistent guidelines on authorship?
Article in MedGenMed : Medscape general medicine, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of research on the meaning, ethics and practices of authorship across scholarly disciplines.PloS one · 2011Pooled it
- Author ordering and citation-based measures of scholarly impact: Implications for research assessment.Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadien · 2025Article
- Ethical and academic dilemmas in authorship of clinical research publications: a medical oncologist's perspective.Medical oncology (Northwood, London, England) · 2025Review
- Activity for CUREs to increase student understanding and application of responsible authorship and publication practices.Journal of microbiology & biology education · 2024Article
- Systematic review and meta-analyses of studies analysing instructions to authors from 1987 to 2017.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Student Perceptions of Authoring a Publication Stemming from a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE).CBE life sciences education · 2021Article
- What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2021Article
- No room for ambiguity: The concepts of appropriate and inappropriate authorship in scientific publications.Indian journal of ophthalmology · 2021Article
- Courtesy Authorship in Academic Surgery Publications.JAMA surgery · 2019Article
- Authorship: from credit to accountability. Reflections from the Editors' Network.Clinical research in cardiology : official journal of the German Cardiac Society · 2019Review
- Authorship: from credit to accountability : Reflections from the Editors' Network.Netherlands heart journal : monthly journal of the Netherlands Society of Cardiology and the Netherlands Heart Foundation · 2019Article
- Authorship: From Credit to Accountability Reflections From the Editors´ Network.Anatolian journal of cardiology · 2019Article
- Scientific misconduct and accountability in teams.PloS one · 2019Article
- Article
- Resolving authorship disputes by mediation and arbitration.Research integrity and peer review · 2018Article
- An Analysis of Medical Laboratory Technology Journals' Instructions for Authors.Science and engineering ethics · 2016Article
- Authorship policies of scientific journals.Journal of medical ethics · 2016Article
- Authors and Contributors in Scientific and Medical Publications.Indian journal of clinical biochemistry : IJCB · 2016Article
- Do Croatian open access journals support ethical research? Content analysis of instructions to authors.Biochemia medica · 2015Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
contextDetermining the authorship of scientific papers can be difficult and authorship disputes are common. Less experienced authors may benefit from clear advice about authorship from journals while both authors and readers would benefit from consistent policies between journals. However, previous surveys of authors have suggested that there are no universally known or accepted criteria for determining authorship.
objectiveTo review instructions to contributors from a broad sample of biomedical journals to discover how much guidance they provide about authorship and whether their advice is consistent with one another and with international guidelines.
designReview and analysis of published instructions to authors.
settingBiomedical journals that publish instructions in English on the Internet.
methodsI examined the instructions to contributors from 234 biomedical journals (randomly selected from the membership list of the World Association of Medical Editors and from Medline).
resultsOf the 234 instructions examined, 100 (41%) gave no guidance about authorship, 68 (29%) were based on the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' (ICMJE) criteria, 33 (14%) proposed other criteria, and 33 (14%) said nothing except that all authors should have approved the manuscript. Of those instructions that were based on the ICMJE criteria, 18/51 (35%) cited an outdated version. Only 21 of the journals (9%) required individuals' contributions to be described.
conclusionsJournals do not provide consistent guidance about authorship and many editors are therefore missing an important opportunity to educate potential contributors and to improve the accuracy, fairness, and transparency of author listing.
Indexed as
Identifiers
18092023PMC2100079What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.