A recent leader of science in the United States compared authorship assignment to sex and intimated that both procedures should be kept private.  In the light of recent authorship investigations, which find substantial ethical violations, this attitude becomes more difficult to defend.

One day I asked the author of the very first authorship investigation(1) , why was it that it was published in such an unusual place, "Journal Supplement Abstract Service Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology"?  It turned out that his manuscript had been rejected twice from the American Psychologist, a respected journal with high circulation and a seemingly appropriate place for the very first authorship investigation.  I read the letters of rejection and found that the editor had written:

“Like sex before the seventies, the matter of how authorship is settled is little spoken about but widely understood in the community --- Joint authorship decisions like decisions about sex … do, or should, have a degree of intimacy about them.”

The editor was William Bevan, former President of the American Psychological Association, former editor of Science, an important player in the MacArthur foundation, and former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  One of the most powerful science policy makers in the world.

Nevertheless, the author resubmitted his manuscript only to find it rejected a second time with a disapproving referee offering the following remark:

“If this report is ever published, I do hope that all 303 respondents to the survey will be listed as co-authors with their names anagramatized (sic!) and listed in order of distance of their residence from Peoria.”

Should authorship be treated like sex?  Should an investigator of authorship have to find out exactly how far from Peoria his survey respondents live before his manuscript can be published? Dr. Bevan did not make a public policy on this issue and therefore we have more data to base our decision on.  This data suggests that authorship might benefit from some external scrutiny.

Flanagin, Pace, Carey, Lundberg et al (2) found that 19% of manuscripts in six medical journals had honorary authors, and 11% had ghost authors.  There was no difference in honorary authorship between small circulation journals and the prestigious high circulation journals Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Lancet recently set an example by publishing descriptions the specific author contributions.  Using these descriptions, Yank and Rennie found that 44% of contributors on the byline did not fulfill even a lenient version of the Biomedical Editors' criteria for authorship (3).

Sciences other than the biomedical ones have been studied less.  I found that in physics, authorship is not well defined, authorship guidelines are weak and not well marketed (for example, they do not appear in the mainstream physics journals).

In 70-75% of relationships of supervisors and junior physicists there is no discussion of authorship criteria.  If the junior physicist has a coauthor, there is a 17% chance the coauthorship is inappropriate, a 14% chance the supervisor is an inappropriate author (he or she is an author on 92% of the junior physicist's papers), but only a 1% chance that the junior scientist her or himself is the inappropriate author - inappropriate authorship seems to flow upwards.

Dr. Bevan preferred to keep authorship issues private but this probably hurts junior scientists:  they are very vulnerable towards intellectual exploitation.  There needs to be more scrutiny into who becomes an author on a scientific work.

Physics journal editors do not seem to include authorship standards, though the American Physical Society has ethical guidelines (APS Guidelines for Professional Conduct as published on the APS Web page at www.aps.org/statements/91.8.html) which include a one sentence authorship standard:  "Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the concept, design, execution and interpretation of the research study.”

In the biomedical sciences, the criteria are spelled out directly by the Council of Science Editors.  Their definition is much more substantial and precise:

" All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content.

"Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to (a) either the conception and design or the analysis and interpretation of data and to (b) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content and on (c) final approval of the version to be published. All three conditions must be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author.

"Editors may ask authors to describe what each contributed; this information may be published.

"Increasingly, multicentre trials are attributed to a corporate author. All members of the group who are named as authors, either in the authorship position below the title or in a footnote, should fully meet the above criteria for authorship. Group members who do not meet these criteria should be listed, with their permission, in the Acknowledgement or in an appendix (see Acknowledgements).

"The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the coauthors.  Because the order is assigned in different ways, its meaning cannot be  inferred accurately unless it is stated by the authors. Authors may wish to  explain the order of authorship in a footnote. In deciding on the order,  authors should be aware that many journals limit the number of authors  listed in the table of contents … (see, for example, http://www.cma.ca/publications/mwc/uniform.htm).

If you are interested in authorship issues, check out the latest white paper on the topic from the Council of Science Editors at http://councilscienceeditors.org/services_ATFWhitePaper.php3.

Eugen Tarnow, Ph.D. (MIT '89)
Member of the American Physical Society and of the Council of Science Editors
tarnow@bigfoot.com

(1). Vasta, R. (1981) The matter of publication credit: a survey of APA members, Journal Supplement Abstract Service Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology 11: 2-3.

(2).  Flanagin, Annette RN, MA; Pace, Brian P. MA; Carey, Lisa A. PhD; Lundberg, George D. MD; and others.  "Prevalence of Articles With Honorary Authors and Ghost Authors in Peer-Reviewed Medical Journals." JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association v280, n3 (July 15, 1998):222.

(3).  Yank V; Rennie D. "Disclosure of researcher contributions: a study of original research articles in The Lancet." Annals of Internal Medicine, 1999