Current definitions of authorship in medical] research are not working. This was one thing agreed by researchers and editors who gathered in Nottingham last week at a meeting organised jointly by the BMJ, the Lancet, the University of Nottingham, and the international peer review research network, Locknet. Current definitions of authorship are not well known and are often not accepted even when they are known; and some people who appear as authors of medical studies have done nothing, while others who have done a great deal of work are not named.
The conference agreed with Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of JAMA, that authorship brings both credit and responsibility. You cannot have one without the other. The question was how to construct a definition of authorship that gave credit to those who deserved it and responsibility (for the honesty and accuracy of research reports) to those who should take it. Should the existing guidelines for authorship, drawn up by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (the Vancouver group) in 1985, be enforced, revised, or replaced altogether?
The Vancouver guidelines state that "each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content" and "that authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to a) conception and design, or 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." Authors must meet all three criteria. All other contributions, including data collection and raising funds, should be mentioned in the acknowledgements.
The problem, according to Raj Bhopal, professor of public health in Newcastle, is that many researchers do not know about the guidelines and many who do know about them disagree with them and find them difficult to follow. In a recent survey of researchers in one university department including all heads of department, only a quarter of 66 responders were aware of the -authorship criteria and only a fifth felt that the criteria were adhered to. While most researchers agreed with each of the three criteria individually, two thirds were unhappy with the stipulation that all authors should meet all three criteria. This, they believed, was too restrictive and would exclude technicians and research assistants. About two thirds of those surveyed thought that "gift" authorship where heads of department are listed as authors even when they have done nothing-was common. Over half felt that it should be prohibited.
The answer, Drummond Rennie suggested, was to scrap "authorship" and replace authors with "contributors" and "guarantors." All those who had contributed to the work in any way would be listed as contributors, and the exact nature and extent of their contribution could be disclosed by publishing it alongside the research report. This "film credit" approach would eliminate gift authorship, he said, because gifts would be disclosed ("contribution: head of department"). It would eliminate ghost authorship-where big name researchers are paid to put their name to reports of research that has been sponsored and written up by industry. It would also encourage researchers to acknowledge statisticians (often missed off the list of authors) and clinicians who contribute patients. The order in which contributors were listed could be agreed between them. Overall responsibility would ideally be shared by all contributors, he said, but where that was impossible because of the complexity of a study,contributors would name one or more coworkers as "guarantors" of the whole.
At the ensuing meeting of the Vancouver group, editors from the major general medical journals decided that there was not enough evidence to justify an immediate -change in the definition of authorship. They agreed to encourage journals to experiment with the film credits idea, to see if they can -get researchers to say exactly what they did. The self reported contributions would then be published with the paper as well as the usual list of authors and acknowledgements. The group agreed to encourage debate and to consult widely among researchers. Three different scenarios will be prepared and discussed at the group's next meeting in Boston in 1997: to retain the current guidelines but to disseminate and enforce them more actively, to modify the guidelines, or to take the radical step of replacing authors and acknowledgements with contributors and guarantors.
FIONA GODLEE, BMJ
| Authorship collection |