International Committee Of Medical Journal Editors Guidelines Research Articles

Adherence to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors–recommended gender equity policy in nursing journals listed in MEDLINE or PubMed Central: a descriptive study

Purpose: The evolving landscape of nursing research emphasizes inclusive representation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has established guidelines to ensure the fair representation of various demographic variables, including age, sex, and ethnicity. This study aimed to evaluate the adherence of nursing journals indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed Central to the ICMJE’s directives on gender equity, given that journals indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed Central typically adhere to the ICMJE’s guidelines.Methods: A descriptive literature review methodology was employed to analyze 160 nursing journals listed in two databases as of July 28, 2023. The website of each journal was searched, and the most recent original article from each was selected. These articles were then evaluated for their alignment with the ICMJE guidelines on gender equity. Descriptive statistics were applied to categorize and enumerate the cases.Results: Of the articles reviewed from 160 journals, 115 dealt with human populations. Of these, 93 required a description of gender equity. Within this subset, 83 articles distinguished between the genders of human subjects. Gender-based interpretations were provided in 15 articles, while another 68 did not offer an interpretation of differences by gender. Among the 10 articles that did not delineate gender, only two provided a rationale for this omission.Conclusion: Among recent articles published in the nursing journals indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed Central, only 16.1% presented clear gender analyses. These findings highlight the need for editors to strengthen their dedication to gender equity within their editorial policies.

Compliance with best practice guidelines on publication ethics: Where does Pharmactuel stand? A case study

Background: The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) are two internationally recognised organisations in the field of publication ethics. Guidelines from these two organisations were updated in 2018. Objectives: To assess the extent to which the journal Pharmactuel is compliant with the guidelines on publication ethics updated by ICMJE and COPE in 2018 and, where the journal is found  wanting, to take the necessary steps to make it compliant. Methods:  A list of updated criteria – 56 by ICMJE and 22 by COPE – was compiled. In January 2020, compliance with each of these criteria was evaluated by the editor-in-chief and validated by all six associate editors. The evaluation was followed by an action plan to improve compliance, and the evaluation was repeated in November 2020. Results: Of the 56 ICMJE criteria, Pharmactuel was fully compliant with 31 and partly compliant with 10 criteria (a compliance rate of 73%, taking the two together). The corresponding figures for the 22 COPE criteria were 17, 3, and 91%. By modifying its editorial policies, training its associate editors, and creating appropriate guidelines for its editorial board and editors, Pharmactuel achieved almost 100% compliance by the end of 2020. Conclusions: Pharmactuel has been fully compliant with ICMJE and COPE recommendations since January 2021. Minor modifications to Pharmactuel’s publication process have enabled the editorial team to ensure that the journal continues to be almost totally compliant with COPE and ICMJE guidelines and to uphold its high ethical standards.

Cross-Sectional Analysis of Patient-Centered Language Use in Journals Publishing Research Focused on Heart Failure.

Detrimental effects of using non-patient-centered language (nPCL) have been reported for diabetes, mental illness, and obesity, and both the American Medical Association (AMA) and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommend using patient-centered language in medical literature. Heart failure is a common yet stigmatized disease, and nPCL may further propagate stigma. This study analyzed current use of nPCL in journals focused on heart failure research and also examined whether the journals steer authors to adhere to AMA or ICMJE guidelines regarding nPCL. Following systematic search of PubMed for heart failure-related articles published from May 1, 2018, to April 30, 2020, cross-sectional analysis was performed. Each selected article was inspected for an array of nPCL terms and frequency of nPCL usage. Chi-squared tests and multivariable logistic regressions were used to assess relationships between study characteristics and nPCL use. Of the 195 articles fully analyzed, 108 (55.4%) contained a nPCL term, the most frequently used being "heart failure patient" (78.7%), "burden" (23.1%), and "suffer" (15.7%). Use of nPCL was disproportionately more common in original research articles (63.5%) and less common in case reports (18.2%). Articles that did not detail any treatment or intervention used the most nPCL (71.1%). No statistically significant association was found between a journal's impact factor and its adherence to AMA or ICMJE recommendations. nPCL is widely used in publications reporting on heart failure. We encourage authors and journals to reduce nPCL to help decrease the stigma patients with this disease often encounter.

Honorary authorship in high-impact journals in anaesthesia and pain medicine.

Enlisting an author on a published paper, whose input was insufficient, is called honorary authorship. The aim of this study is to assess the proportion of honorary authorship in the field of pain medicine. Data were collected from seven high-impact journals. Corresponding authors were sent a survey regarding their awareness on authorship guidelines, the decision-making in authorship and specific contributions made to the surveyed article. We identified two types of honorary authorship: (1) self-perceived honorary authorship, which is measured by asking the corresponding author if honorary authorship was present according to their opinion and (2) International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)-defined honorary authorship, which is honorary authorship based on the guidelines. In total, 1051 mails were sent and 231 responded, leading to a response rate of 22.0%. 81.3% of the respondents were familiar with the ICMJE authorship guidelines, while 59.6% were aware of the issue of honorary authorship. 13.3% of the respondents were employed at a department in which the senior member is automatically included on all manuscripts. The ICMJE-defined honorary authorship was 40%, while self-perceived honorary authorship was 13.5%. There seems to be a high awareness of the ICMJE guidelines among corresponding authors in the field of Pain Medicine. Despite this high awareness, a high proportion of journal articles had honorary authorship, suggesting that authorship guidelines fail to be applied in a significant proportion of the literature.

Research transparency promotion by surgical journals publishing randomised controlled trials: a survey

ObjectiveTo describe surgical journals’ position statements on data-sharing policies (primary objective) and to describe key features of their research transparency promotion.MethodsOnly “SURGICAL” journals with an impact factor higher than 2 (Web of Science) were eligible for the study. They were included, if there were explicit instructions for clinical trial publication in the official instructions for authors (OIA) or if they had published randomised controlled trial (RCT) between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2018. The primary outcome was the existence of a data-sharing policy included in the instructions for authors. Data-sharing policies were grouped into 3 categories, inclusion of data-sharing policy mandatory, optional, or not available. Details on research transparency promotion were also collected, namely the existence of a “prospective registration of clinical trials requirement policy”, a conflict of interests (COIs) disclosure requirement, and a specific reference to reporting guidelines, such as CONSORT for RCT.ResultsAmong the 87 surgical journals identified, 82 were included in the study: 67 (82%) had explicit instructions for RCT and the remaining 15 (18%) had published at least one RCT. The median impact factor was 2.98 [IQR = 2.48–3.77], and in 2016 and 2017, the journals published a median of 11.5 RCT [IQR = 5–20.75].The OIA of four journals (5%) stated that the inclusion of a data-sharing statement was mandatory, optional in 45% (n = 37), and not included in 50% (n = 41).No association was found between journal characteristics and the existence of data-sharing policies (mandatory or optional). A “prospective registration of clinical trials requirement” was associated with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) allusion or affiliation and higher impact factors. Journals with specific RCT instructions in their OIA and journals referenced on the ICMJE website more frequently mandated the use of CONSORT guidelines.ConclusionResearch transparency promotion is still limited in surgical journals. Standardisation of journal requirements according to ICMJE guidelines could be a first step forward for research transparency promotion in surgery.

Authorship Proliferation in Hand Surgery Research: How Many Hand Surgeons Does it Take to Write a Research Article?

Dear Sir, Authorship is the currency of academic surgeons [1]. Research publications are the principal metric of academic success, which in turn are linked with scholarly achievement and academic prestige. Reported is a dramatic expansion of authorship in biomedical and medical research [2]. We performed an observational analysis on authorship trends in the six highest impact factors journals publishing hand surgery research over a twenty-year period, including the years 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008, 2013. All original hand surgery research articles were assessed from the following journals; Plastics and Reconstructive Surgery, Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery, Journal of Hand Surgery -European Volume, Journal of Hand Surgery-American Volume, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery and The Bone & Joint Journal. After reviewing 1221 articles, we identified a constant proliferation in authorship of hand surgery research, over the 20 year period, from 3.05 to 4.33 authors per article (p = 0.021) (Fig. 1). The proportion of single-author articles also decreased significantly over this period, from 32 % in 1993 to 10.7 % in 2013 (p = 0.038). This 41.9 % increase in authorship in hand surgery research has been mirrored in other surgery specialities including neurosurgery [3] and orthopaedics [4]. Fig. 1 Trend in no. of authors per article over 20 years (1993–2013) A need to improve research design, use of advanced statistics and the requirement of multicentre participation to increase study populations partially justifies this trend. We believe a rise in honorary authorship, a type of illegitimate authorship, possibility also explains this substantial proliferation. Honorary authorship, whereby acknowledgment is not a reflection of scientific contribution, distorts the fundamental integrity of scientific publications. The adoption of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) author’s criteria [5] and statements of contributorship in manuscripts by journals, have done little to curtail this problem [6]. So what else can be done to limit this undesirable trend? Firstly, we believe, authors must uphold a personal responsibility in order to maintain their ethical probity regarding contributions to research, in line with scientific codes of conduct and ICMJE guidelines. Secondly, changes made by the editors of journals including increased credit for acknowledgements or capping the number of authors per publication, potentially could limit authorship proliferation. Regardless of the manner, action is necessary to deter the detrimental rise of illegitimacies in authorship, which is the key to a healthy academic environment.

What is this duplicate publication thing?

One of the commonest queries I receive as Editor-in-Chief is whether a submission can be accepted when the author’s message is already known. The paper may have been presented at meetings a couple of times and might even have appeared in abstract form. Can we, as a journal, go ahead and publish without eyebrows being raised and the accusation of duplicate publication being made? The story starts with a classic of the editing world. His name was Franz Ingelfinger, a German-American, and for 9 years (1967–76) he was the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. You may have heard of him, although on the other hand you may not. Ingelfinger [1], in 1969, proposed a key rule of the publication game by which we all adhere to this day. He laid out the definition of what we now call duplicate (or dual) publication. This is when the same material is published more than once by either the author or the publisher. It is not the same as plagiarism, which is when someone different performs republication [2]. Duplicate publication is more common than you think. Have a look at Deja vu [3], a database of highly similar citations, where you will see the problem laid out before you. Duplicate publication does certainly exist, is regarded as a form of research misconduct, and is something that as an editor you need always to keep in the back of your mind. I can see the pressure, of course. Journals take time to reach a decision, so why not submit the same paper to two, three, maybe four or five journals simultaneously? After all, is that not what creative authors do in the big, bad world of mass-market writing? Then before you know it, two of your identical submissions are accepted, one some months after the other and … bingo! … you have entered the ranks of the duplicate publishing author. Or, you may be a particularly prolific author and have forgotten that one of your team submitted a paper on a specific topic 2 years earlier. It may have been published in some lesser-known journal and may even have passed you by. It happens. A subsequent trainee has a go, unaware of his predecessor’s actions and out comes that second paper. Again, unwittingly you have become a duplicate author and it is not a happy place to be. Anyway, why should a journal worry? Why should anyone be concerned? After all, each of us seeks to disseminate our work as widely and as rapidly as we can. Yet the publishing dilemma is clear because duplicate publications can cause trouble for a number of reasons [4]: They waste finite resources. Journals have a limited number of pages available and duplicate submissions will be reviewed twice, indexed twice, copyedited twice, distributed twice and so on. They overload available medical information. It simply takes longer to find what you need. They overemphasize the findings. The classic is a meta-analysis looking at the antiemetic efficacy of ondansetron [5]. This showed that duplicate publication led to an overestimation of ondansetron’s efficacy by 23%. Duplicate publications contravene copyright law, if you have signed your copyright across to another journal. This is less of a problem these days with Open Access, where the requirement for an author to hand over copyright is becoming rare. Language bias is also an issue, especially for an international journal and certainly when it comes to the influence on meta-analyses. One study [6] assessed whether authors were more likely to publish positive results in English language journals rather than German. The answer was a resounding ‘yes’. However, in the process, the authors had to exclude 19 of their 62 studies (31%) because they were duplicate publications, one in English and the other in German. That is a huge number. The Anglo-German study may be exceptional but the problem is manifestly global. In the former Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (Br) a study of so-called original articles in that journal showed one in 13 to be duplicate or fragmented publications [7]. Fragmented publishing is the same as so-called salami-slicing. A more recent paper from South Korea in 2008 [8] looked specifically at publications in Korean Medical Journals indexed in KoreaMed and found 27 of 455 (5.93%) articles were duplicates. On Medline presently, there sit 22 million references [9] to journal articles in the life sciences, predominantly biomedicine. Just think how much space there might be for the rest of us if the duplicates were removed? There is clearly a problem out there and each of us—authors, reviewers and editors—needs to be on our guard. So what are the rules of the game? These are well described by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and followed by many [10]. The guidelines look at four things: duplicate submission, duplicate publication, acceptable secondary publication and manuscripts based on the same database. I would suggest reading them in full. There is nothing surprising about any of them. Two things are very clear, however. First, submitting the same paper to two journals simultaneously is a non-starter. Second, if your submission is very similar to work reported elsewhere then (i) reference that work and (ii) say so in your letter of submission. However, if your work has appeared as a presentation or abstract before, that does not matter, but do reference it anyway. Of course, none of what I have written here is applicable to JHPS, but duplicate publication is certainly a topic about which I am asked repeatedly by potential authors. That need for us each to publish frequently and widely seems insatiable. So please have a read of the ICMJE guidelines [10] and, if your submission fits, by all means send it in. Now turning to JHPS and its content, which in many respects is why I am here, what specifically grabbed my attention in the last issue (2.2)? Naturally every paper we publish has done well to appear on our pages and each has added its own aliquot of information to the ever-expanding field of hip preservation surgery. However, I was especially caught by Kalisvaart and Safran’s [11] review on hip microinstability, as this is manifestly an area of hip surgery that is expanding fast. Watch that space, for sure. I was also incredibly impressed by the minisymposium on evolving concepts in extra-articular hip pathology [12–16], put together by some really supportive authors and with Hal Martin’s truly dedicated lead. I recommended it last time and I do it again now. Do read the whole minisymposium; in fact do please peruse every last paper published. You will not be disappointed. And for this issue? Issue 2.3? Oh boy, things are beginning to take off at such a pace and in a way that I for one never expected so early in the life of a fledgling journal. Downloads are skyrocketing and our submission inbox always, always, always contains something interesting. Actually, everything sent in is interesting. Why, oh why can we not publish the lot? It is our reviewers, you see. They have an eye for the uncanny, the worthwhile, the message we can all take home. They are a tremendous lot and deserve the largest vote of thanks any editor can give. So when you look at issue 2.3 do be sure to read everything, although I confess to lingering a little longer over two papers in particular. The first was the excellent review by Bardakos [17] on all those impingements that are not femoroacetabular. There are plenty of them out there. The other was that wonderful paper by Cvetanovich et al.[18] on hip arthroscopy after Bernese periacetabular osteotomy. I loved that one, not only for its content but also for its subject matter. Those of us who have been around for longer than most well remember the days when osteotomists and arthroscopists would rarely speak. Now look at it. There are papers being submitted from groups that offer both. The true friendship that hip preservation has now engendered is there for us all to see. My very best wishes to you all.

Data Citation and the Author Byline: Who’s Line Is it Anyway?

A recent article by Rohlfing & Poline1 has started a dialog regarding the use of ‘Institutional Authorship’ in the authorship list of manuscripts that utilize the resources of some consortia and organizations. The criteria for authorship adopted by Neuroinformatics2 (see Box) are set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)3. Specifically, authorship credit should be based only on: a) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; b) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and c) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Rohlfing and Poline provide a detailed reading and interpretation of these guidelines makes it clear that ‘institutions’ or ‘consortia’ do not meet the specific criteria for inclusion as an author. In conjunction with efforts to improve the acknowledgement and counting of the impact of all neuroscience resources, Neuroinformatics plans to implement a policy in the future to phase out the routine acceptance of manuscripts with Corporate or Institutional Authorship. BOX Neuroinformatics Instructions for Authors The criteria for authorship adopted by Neuroinformatics are set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors at http://www.icmje.org/index.html#authorship Specifically, authorship credit should be based only on: (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3)final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, feedback on the manuscript, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship See http://www.springer.com/biomed/neuroscience/journal/12021 for details. An interpretation that would exclude ‘consortium’ authorship, however, results in an impasse for large-scale science that has adopted such practices. Some consortia, such as Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)4, require, as part of their data use agreement, institutional authorship. Any journal that would prohibit such authorship, therefore, would cut off submission of manuscripts derived from these sources. This would probably not have an adverse effect on the publication of papers as these manuscripts would likely be submitted to journals that do not enforce such an authorship limitation/definition. What currently happens to authorship citations of this sort in the MEDLINE index? Introduced in 2001, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) indexing includes a ‘Corporate Author (CN)’ field in order to indicate a corporate or consortium author in the author list. In the NLM ‘Authorship in MEDLINE’ fact sheet5, after reminding users to use the ICMJE guidelines, provides details about how these corporate names are decoded and indexed. Also from this fact sheet is a definition for citations fields for ‘collaborator names’: “When a group name for a specific consortium, committee, study group, or the like appears in an article byline, the personal names of the members of that group may be published in the article text. Such names are entered as collaborator names for the MEDLINE citation. Collaborator names are entered for a MEDLINE citation only when a group (corporate) author name is present for the citation.” The Figure includes the details for a publication using the ADNI consortium data that includes the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Consortium as an author and enumerates 317 Collaborator Names (coded as IR and FIR in the MEDLINE syntax)6. Figure This figure shows the PubMed and MEDLINE representations for a specific paper (Dai Y, Wang Y, Wang L, Wu G, Shi F, Shen D; Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. aBEAT: a toolbox for consistent analysis of longitudinal adult brain MRI. PLoS ... It is important to look at why institutional authorship is required by some organizations. The reason seems clear; it is the only currently available way to get an easily accessible, precise counting of publications of the use of the ‘product’ of a consortium. If you want to know how may publications ADNI data is associated with a simple query at PubMed7 “Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative[Corporate Author]” yields 420 citations (on 5/1/2013). This precise number would be vary labor intensive to obtain through the counting of times that ADNI is cited in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section (someone would have to review every paper published to monitor for such occurrences) or through counting of citations to a specific set of data papers (papers can be cited even when the data is not used). Given the amount of money invested into these various consortia and initiatives, it is clearly important to be able to generate accurate, easy to obtain quantitative metrics for the success of the effort. The question is if this ‘need for counting’ best served by also usurping the traditional meaning of manuscript authorship? It is unlikely that any consortium investigator includes the 420 citations on their Curriculum Vitae, or that anyone reading the vitae would know what to make of that number if they did. The problem is exacerbated in that there are many groups/consortia that would like a good counting system to support the assessment of the utility of their efforts. Not only data, but software, websites, equipment, etc. can all be the ‘product’ of a system that would value a precise counting of the utilization of their efforts. Using a ‘corporate author’ procedure for this counting just opens the floodgates for using authorship to count use of everything. Why shouldn’t the software development teams of the FMRIB Software Library (FSL)8, FreeSurfer9, AFNI10, Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM)11, etc. all use corporate authorship to track their software utilization? Therefore, a different solution to this problem is to make acknowledgement and attributions of resources used in manuscripts countable and trackable (in a similar way that current authorship and literature citations are currently). It was in someone’s interest when the tracking for traditional authorship in publications was first introduced, followed by the tracking of cited literature in articles. Both, in the end, driven by the ‘economics’ for metrics such as the authors ‘h-index’12 and a journals ‘impact factor’13. It is now in the ‘best interest’ of the neuroscience community to better track the large-consortia investment in numerous ‘big science’ efforts in order to effectively document utilization. In principle, this tracking does not seem that it should be difficult to implement. The MEDLINE citation has already proved quite adaptable to the evolution of citation description needs. As currently constructed, a ‘Corporate Author’, unless it really did perform ICJME authorship activities and this is duly annotated in the manuscript, is essentially a ‘Corporate/Consortia Attribution’. Instead of being transcribed from the ‘author byline’, it should be extracted from the Acknowledgement section of the manuscript. Consortia development and credit for virtually any type of data, software or other resource can be attributed in this fashion, as long as the MEDLINE indexing is updated to follow such conventions. The neuroscience community (its scientists, publications, authors, editors and reviewers) needs to unite to insist on a course of action that preserves the meaning of individual authorship. One might be tempted to ask “Is it too late already?” and suggest that the community should just embrace and expand their use of the current Corporate Author designation to its fullest. A paper, using the ADNI data, and software from FSL and FreeSurfer, should include ‘corporate’ authorship for each of these development teams. Yet this seems to diminish the scientific value of the ‘author’ concept in favor of the economic value of ‘count-ability’, and hopefully the answer is ‘no’. In support of this position and in response to the scientific community reactions, the journal Neuroinformatics plans to phase out the acceptance of manuscripts with Corporate Authorship, in favor of the adoption of Corporate/Consortia Attribution indexing, by January 2015.

Medical Journal Editors Issue Uniform Disclosure Standard

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessMedical Journal Editors Issue Uniform Disclosure StandardJun YanJun YanSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:20 Nov 2009https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.44.22.psychnews_44_22_004AbstractMainstream medical journals may be moving toward a common standard for authors to report their financial and other conflicts of interest following an October announcement by a group of prominent medical journal editors.Most peer-reviewed biomedical journals have already imposed explicit requirements for authors of submitted manuscripts to report their financial interests, including funding and employment. These requirements are often similar but may differ in how the conflicts of interest are defined and should be reported.Now, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has put forth a uniform standard for reporting authors' potential conflicts of interest for manuscript submissions. The standard was approved and adopted by all ICMJE members, consisting of the editors of 12 general medical journals in nine countries and two representatives from the World Association of Medical Editors and the National Library of Medicine.In recent years, controversies over ethical research reporting and conflicts of interest have plagued the medical journal and research communities. The new disclosure standard requires each study author to report four types of financial or other ties: (1) commercial funding sources of the work described in the manuscripts, (2) commercial entities “that could be viewed as having an interest in the general area of the submitted manuscript” within 36 months before the submission, (3) financial ties involving the author's spouse or children under age 18, and (4) any nonfinancial associations that “may be relevant” to the manuscript.To ensure consistency across journals, the ICMJE developed a standard Uniform Disclosure Form for Potential Conflicts of Interest, which authors can fill out online in a PDF file and submit to any of the ICMJE member journals. The form asks each author to identify the type of his or her financial relationships with commercial entities, such as consultancies, gifts, and grants.Among the dozen members of the ICMJE are the New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet. The organization is an extremely influential force in setting the standard for manuscript submissions to peer-reviewed biomedical journals. A large number of biomedical journals adapt or follow the ICMJE's guidelines and principles.The American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) is among the journals that follow the ICMJE “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” and had implemented similar or more stringent disclosure requirements even before this ICMJE announcement, Michael Roy, the editorial director of AJP, told Psychiatric News.“We appreciate and applaud the ICMJE for its efforts in setting standards for disclosure of financial relationships,” Roy said. “As this new form is being tested, we are currently working with the ICMJE on achieving agreement with our current guidelines, since in some areas we request more information than that set forth in the ICMJE form.”AJP's requirement for author disclosure of financial relationships states that “financial support for the study is always disclosed, whether from governmental, nonprofit, or commercial sources” and that authors must report all financial relationships, “whether or not directly related to the subject of their paper. Such reporting must include all equity ownership, profit-sharing agreements, royalties, patents, and research or other grants from private industry or closely affiliated nonprofit funds.”The AJP financial-disclosure requirement previously covered the 12-month period before the manuscript submission, but will be expanded to 36 months to be consistent with the new ICMJE standard, according to AJP Editor-in-Chief Robert Freedman, M.D.The ICMJE editorial “Uniform Format for Disclosure of Competing Interests in ICMJE Journals” is posted at <www.icmje.org/format.pdf>. The online “ICMJE Uniform Disclosure Form for Potential Conflicts of Interest” is posted at <www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf>. ISSUES NewArchived

Bye Bye By-Line, Hello Contributors

Medical research usually involves lots of people. That's a good thing, as few individuals possess all the skills, let alone the time, to design, perform, analyse and report a substantial trial by themselves. But it poses problems when research is reported. The list of authors (or by-line) serves several functions: it tells readers and editors who did the work and allows authors to take credit if the work is good and responsibility if it is flawed. The most widely cited guidelines on authorship come from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).1 The 1988 version stated that only those who had played a part in the conception and design or analysis and interpretation of a study could qualify as authors, but in 2000 ‘acquisition of data’ was added as a qualifying activity.2 Authors must also take part in drafting or revising the article and should approve the final version. But, as noted on the BMJ Instructions to Authors, this definition ‘has some serious flaws’.3 For example, in a multi-centre study involving a large number of centres, each of which recruits a similar (but relatively small) number of patients, who decides which investigators will also be involved in developing a manuscript? What's more, a survey of 66 British researchers in 1997 showed that only 24% had heard of the ICMJE authorship criteria, 11-15% disagreed with at least one of the criteria and 62% disagreed that authors should meet all three criteria (study involvement, writing the paper and approval).4 The ICMJE guidelines also say nothing helpful about the order of authors (simply that this should be ‘a joint decision’). Yet academic appointments often depend on the length of the candidate's publication list, on the assumption that individuals are listed in order of their contribution and that all deserving authors have been listed. But the value of different contributions to a research project is highly subjective. How should one rank one person who designed a trial but recruited no patients, against a second who recruited most of the patients but played no part in the design, against a third who analysed the data? And what if the study report on which the paper was based was prepared by a writer working for the sponsor—should that person be an author? The traditional system of author listing gives readers and editors (and reviewers, if the journal uses open review) no detail about who did what or how the order was decided. Some journals permit authors to explain the order (e.g. if it is alphabetical). Bearing the name Wager, I will leave readers to guess what I think of alphabetical ordering—and whether Dr Abbasi agrees! Because authorship matters to people, and because researchers are human and therefore do not always behave ethically, abuse of authorship will always be a problem. Of the 212 cases considered by the Committee on Publication Ethics over a six-year period, authorship issues were the second most common category, accounting for 12% of the cases.5 This is probably a gross underestimate of the true extent of the problem, since with traditional author bylines, editors are usually blissfully unaware of the abuses they conceal. The commentary to one particularly egregious case featured in the 2003 COPE report noted ‘all too often claims for authorship are still based on power and influence and not necessarily contributions’.6 The two most common problems are gift authorship, when the undeserving swell the list, and ghost authorship, when deserving authors do not appear.7 The motivation for such misconduct is varied but probably includes colleagues playing the game of mutual CV enhancement (‘I’ll put your name on my paper if you add my name to yours'); ancient but dishonourable traditions of including the professor's name on every paper; researchers adding a ‘big name’ onto the list to increase respectability or the chances of acceptance; and the usual power politics and rivalry that bedevil any human organization. If readers and editors do not know who did what, they are unlikely to detect most cases of authorship abuse. Listing individuals' contributions should reduce many of the problems of ghosts and gifts and follows the spirit of transparency that underlies many other aspects of responsible research reporting. Ghosts can be brought back to life by editors asking who analysed the data or wrote the first draft, if these roles are missing. Guests will be revealed as such (and editors can choose whether they challenge them discreetly before publication or let them be listed for everyone to see). The order of authors and rigid inclusion criteria become less important—if you want to know how many studies a person has designed, or whether they are an energetic recruiter, you can look and see rather than try to guess from the order of listing. Perhaps more importantly for most readers, contributorship encourages transparency about the role of the sponsor in every aspect of the project—something that has often been misrepresented in the past.8,9 Are there any disadvantages? I suppose the list of contributions takes up a small amount of precious journal space, but in the internet age this seems an irrelevance. Authors/contributors will need to be educated and cajoled (early initiatives with voluntary contributor lists were surprisingly poorly adopted).10 Editors also need to pay attention to the way in which contributions are elicited, since Marusic et al. have shown that ticking boxes produces more apparently ‘compliant’—but not necessarily truthful—responses (i.e. with a higher proportion of listed contributors meeting ICMJE criteria) than allowing authors to state contributions in free text.11 Some editors have expressed concern that identifying contributions will split responsibility, so that if an aspect of a study is later found to be incorrect or fraudulent, contributors will pass blame onto each other.7 The ICMJE has debated whether authors should be expected to take public responsibility for an entire project or just their respective portions of it.2 Some journals therefore ask at least one contributor to guarantee the integrity of the research,7 but this is probably of little concern to most readers. Contributorship is not a panacea. Research groups may adopt bizarre criteria for selecting authors (as they probably always have done, whatever editors tell them) but at least this will be transparent. Determined guests and ghost-creators can give false information and put their names to untrue statements, but pleading ignorance will no longer be an excuse. Readers and honest authors (sorry, contributors) should therefore welcome the JRSM's new policy.