ArticleInquiry : a journal of medical care organization, provision and financing2015
Authorship Inflation in Medical Publications.
Article in Inquiry : a journal of medical care organization, provision and financing, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond genuine collaboration: the rise of strategic co-authorship in contemporary academic publishing.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- A Relative Authorship Index: A New Metric for Evaluating Individual Contribution in Scientific Research.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Bibliometric Evolution of Neurosurgery Publications From 1977 to 2023.Neurosurgery practice · 2025Article
- Review
- Publication of observational studies making claims of causation over time.Contemporary clinical trials communications · 2024Article
- Comparative analysis of Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews over three decades.Systematic reviews · 2024Observational
- A Decade of Global Skull Base Researchers: Authorship Trends from 3,295 Abstracts in theJournal of neurological surgery. Part B, Skull base · 2024Article
- Possibilities for ranking business schools and considerations concerning the stability of such rankings.PloS one · 2024Article
- The Author Truncation "et al." in Article References: An Anachronism That Needs to Change.Plastic surgery (Oakville, Ont.) · 2023Article
- Trends in the Number of Authors and Institutions in Papers Published in AJPE 2015-2019.American journal of pharmaceutical education · 2023Article
- Analysis of gender representation, authorship inflation, and institutional affiliation in abstract acceptance: a 5-year study.Global surgical education : journal of the Association for Surgical Education · 2023Article
- An Ethical Exploration of Increased Average Number of Authors Per Publication.Science and engineering ethics · 2022Article
- Middle East Authors' Contribution to theArthroplasty today · 2022Article
- Academic training of authors publishing in high-impact epidemiology and clinical journals.PloS one · 2022Article
- A comprehensive analysis of authorship trends in Skeletal Radiology since inception from 1976 to 2020.Skeletal radiology · 2021Article
- Laser procedures in the treatment of BPH: a bibliometric study.World journal of urology · 2021Article
- Comparing the gender diversity and affiliation trends of the authors for two orthopaedics journals from the Arab world.Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- Knowledge syntheses in medical education: Meta-research examining author gender, geographic location, and institutional affiliation.PloS one · 2021Article
- What Is Wrong With the Current Evaluative Bibliometrics?Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The number of authors per manuscript in peer-reviewed medical journals has increased substantially in the last several decades. Several reasons have been offered to explain this authorship growth, including increased researcher collaboration, honorary authorship driven by increased pressures for funding and promotion, the belief that including senior authors will facilitate publication, and the growing complexity of medical research. It is unknown, however, whether authorship has grown over time due to growing complexity of published academic articles, in which case growth could be warranted, or whether it has grown due to pressures of funding and academic promotion, which have created "authorship inflation." To answer this question, we analyzed data on authorship count, study type, and size of study population for the first 50 original articles published in each decade during 1960-2010 in 3 major medical journals. Within each type of study we considered (eg, randomized trials, observational studies, etc), average authorship rose more than 3-fold during this period. Similar growth persisted after adjustment for changes in study population sizes over time. Our findings suggest that increasing research complexity is an inadequate explanation for authorship growth. Instead, growth in authorship appears inflationary.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What 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.