Authorship decision-making in the field of orthopedic surgery and sports medicine

Abstract

To facilitate decision-making in authorship positions, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editor (ICMJE) developed a guideline that stipulates criteria authors should meet in order to merit authorship. Authors who did not meet these criteria and still enlisted as authors, are called 'honorary' authors. In this study, the prevalence and characteristics of honorary authorship (HA) is assessed in the field of Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. Methods: A survey was distributed among corresponding authors of articles published in 2019 in six Orthopedics-dedicated journals. Results: 479 of the 1392 approached authors responded, leading to a response rate of 34.4%. 91.6% of the respondents were aware of the ICMJE guidelines, whereas 67.8% were aware of the issue of HA. Overall, the prevalence of guideline-based HA was 41.9%, while the prevalence of self-perceived HA was 14.7%. Having a senior member automatically enlisted as author on the departments, was associated with a higher rate of guideline-based HA (OR 5.03) and self-perceived HA (OR 3.31). Conclusions: The prevalence of HA in the field of Orthopedics and Sports Medicine is high, but comparable to other medical fields. Transparency in authorship decision-making is crucial to maintain liability in scientific articles.

Automatically listing senior members of departments as co-authors is highly prevalent in health sciences: meta-analysis of survey research

“…Although a few studies assessed this practice in specific fields 6 – 8 , insight into the magnitude of this practice in the health sciences more broadly is missing. The objective of this study was to assess, in the health sciences, the prevalence of: Researchers reporting the practice of listing (a) senior member(s) of a department, who did not qualify for authorship, as co-author(s) on all or most submitted articles by default (Review item 1).…”

Buenas prácticas en el rol de la autoría en las publicaciones científicas

“…Según Nurmohamed et al (2021), la autoría honorífica afecta directamente la integridad de las publicaciones en las revistas científicas, ya que puede darse el caso, de que la investigación puede registrar irregularidades en el proceso editorial, por esta razón, la transparencia sobre las decisiones en la autoría de un manuscrito es importante, ya que establece buenas prácticas, mantiene la honestidad en la investigación y establece altos niveles de responsabilidad sobre los artículos científicos (Dynako et al, 2020).…”

Métricas para verificación de autoría y emulación de procesos cognitivos

“…cuyo contenido puede ser una amenaza, spam, mensajes racistas, etc. por lo que resulta vital conocer su autoría, o bien extraer meta-información útil en toma de decisiones (Nirkhi Smita, 2016;Brocardo et al, 2015;Abbasi and Chen, 2005;Nurmohamed et al, 2021;Khezr and Mohan, 2022;Haeussler and Sauermann, 2013).…”