Anthony Trollope, one of England's
greatest
nineteenth century novelists, rose at 5 am every morning, wrote for
several hours almost every day of his life, and so completed more than
50 books. That was authorship. The words, characters, and plots all
came from him, and his was the glory and the criticism. Producing a
scientific paper is completely different. Some people conceive the
study, often within a broad programme of work conducted by others.
Different sets of people may design it, collect the data, and analyse
and interpret them. The paper may include techniques as diverse as
molecular biology and economic evaluation, all carried out by different
people. The person who writes the paper may have done nothing but the
writing. Who then will be an author? This becomes a matter of politics,
not science. Often the powerful will be authors and the powerless
ignored or simply acknowledged. We need to scrap the notion of
authorship in science and try something else.
Disquiet about authorship in science has been growing for years. In
the
early 80s John Darsee "coauthored" papers with distinguished
researchers.(1) When the papers proved fraudulent
some
coauthors refused to accept responsibility. This was clearly
unsatisfactory: authorship must bring accountability as well as credit.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (Vancouver
group) thus drew up guidelines (see p 1009) based on the principle that
each author should be able to defend the work publicly.(2)
Several studies have shown, however, that the guidelines are not
working.(3-5) Many "authors" do not meet
the criteria.
Work that we publish today from Newcastle shows that many researchers
did not know of the Vancouver criteria and (when told about them) did
not think them workable (p 1009).(6) Most
researchers
had experienced problems with authorship: many had assigned
inappropriate coauthorship, and many had been excluded when they
thought they deserved it.
Perhaps we need further data on the problems with authorship, but all
the studies so far have found problems. A meeting on the subject held
in Nottingham last June also concluded that the concept of authorship
was broken,(7) while all the conversations I have
had with
researchers convince me that the current Vancouver criteria are not
working.
What action might we take? One option is to publicize the existing
criteria and work harder to enforce them. But the Newcastle study
confirms that most researchers think the Vancouver criteria too
restrictive. Furthermore, the BMJ's attempts to enforce
them-by asking all corresponding authors to sign that the criteria are
met by all authors and that nobody meeting the criteria has been
excluded-have been unsuccessful: almost no changes in authorship
result, despite our knowing that many authors do not meet the criteria.
Secondly, we could tinker with the criteria-make them clearer and,
according to taste, more or less restrictive. But any system that
depends on separating people into sheep (authors) and goats
(non-authors) will lead to arguments and will be decided ultimately on
the grounds of power.
A third, radical, response is to scrap the concept of authorship.
Instead, we would have a descriptive system something like film credits
and talk about contributors rather than authors. This solution was
advocated by Drummond Rennie-deputy editor (West) of
JAMA and doyen of researchers into scientific
publishing-at last year's meeting in Nottingham(7); his
paper is likely to be published soon in JAMA. It should
be possible for researchers to agree easily on who did what,
particularly if they keep a record from the beginning. Readers can then
judge for themselves the relative importance of the contributions.
One problem with the radical solution is over who will take ultimate
responsibility for the study. Without a "guarantor" (Rennie's
term) there is a danger that overall responsibility will be lost.
Clearly the contributor who analysed the data must take responsibility
for a wrong analysis or for doing it badly, but who will take
responsibility when it emerges that the data were invented? The idea of
ultimate responsibility is not a difficult one. Ministers must take
ultimate responsibility for everything done in their departments and
editors for all that is in their journals.
Another argument against "film credits" is that they
"take up too
much space." But this is trivial. A stronger objection is that it
will undermine systems of academic credit-such as citation indices.
But undermining these would be no bad thing: credit should depend more
on thought and less on number crunching.
At its last meeting the Vancouver group decided only to encourage
debate on authorship. In May it will consider the three options
outlined above. This editorial, the paper from Newcastle, and two
letters are the BMJ's contribution to the debate. We
want to hear from readers about this issue-to avoid editors proposing
a solution that is unacceptable to readers and those who produce
papers. We also encourage those who send us papers to experiment with
the system of contributors and guarantors. We will be happy to publish
these credits-in addition, for now, to traditional lists of authors.
Depending on what you tell us, we may soon ask all who send us papers
to try describe themselves as contributors and guarantors.
Richard Smith
Editor
BMJ,
London WC1H 9JR
References
1 Lock S. Research misconduct: a resume of recent
events. In: Lock S, Wells F, eds. Fraud and misconduct in
medical research. London: BMJ Publishing Group, 1996.
2 International Committee of Medical Journal
Editors. Guidelines
on authorship. BMJ 1985;291:722.
3 Shapiro D W, Wenger W S, Shapiro M F. The
contributions of
authors to multiauthored biomedical research papers.
JAMA 1994;271:438-42.
4 Goodman N. Survey of fulfilment of criteria of
authorship in
published medical research. BMJ 1994;309:1482.
5 Eastwood D, Derish P, Leash E, Ordway S.
Ethical issues in
biomedical research: perceptions and practices of postdoctoral fellows
responding to a survey. Science Engineering Ethics
1996;2:89-114.
6 Bhopal R, Rankin J, McColl E, Thomas L, Kaner
E, Stacy R,
et al. The vexed question of authorship: views of
researchers in a British medical faculty. BMJ
1997;314:1009-12.
7 Godlee F. Definition of "authorship"
may be changed.
BMJ 1996;312:1501-2.
