KEY TAKEAWAY

• Open discussion between stakeholders is the key to maintaining transparency and reaching consensus.

Medical writers must often juggle multiple—and sometimes conflicting—requests from various stakeholders, all the while adhering to Good Publication Practice (GPP) guidelines. In a recent poll for their MAP newsletter, the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) asked respondents how they would handle the resurrection of a two-year old real-world evidence (RWE) manuscript. The scenario required respondents to balance the new project owner’s desire to publish promptly with the lead author’s request for additional analysis and author list changes. Dr Eric Y. Wong (Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine) summarised and discussed the results of the poll.

The poll asked: You are the medical writer on a real-world evidence (RWE) manuscript that was initiated 2 years ago. The RWE analyses utilise the services of a third-party data analytics company. At first draft stage, the project was put on hold. The project owner has now left the organisation and the manuscript has been transitioned to a colleague. The lead author would like to perform additional analyses and include one of their colleagues as an author. Meanwhile, the new project owner/client would like to finalise and submit the article as soon as possible.

What would you do?

The results of the poll, which was answered by 131 people, were:

• 87.8% – Convene a conference call between all the authors and relevant internal stakeholders to take a consensus on the best way forward. If the new author is added, all authors need to agree, and the new author must review and approve the manuscript draft.
• 10.7% – Explain the value of performing additional analyses (and spending budget with the third-party analytics company) to the new project owner/client, although this will introduce further delays. Include the new author after aligning with all authors/stakeholders.
• 1.5% – Recommend to the lead author to continue with the manuscript in its current state, as the priority for the project owner is to publish as soon as possible and without inclusion of new author.
• 0% – The additional analyses look simple enough. Carry out the calculations in Excel and circulate the updated draft for final approval without including the new author.

Dr Wong concurred with the consensus opinion. A conference call would allow stakeholders—in this case authors and client leads—to discuss, deliberate, and document a range of options and reach consensus. Authorship changes are permissible so long as ICMJE criteria are met; however,  the project sponsor may lack the budget or timeline flexibility for additional analysis. Dr Wong emphasised that any limitations or mitigations (ie, authors agreeing to take on extra work to support the analysis, or timeline excursions) should be clearly documented.

Some respondents chose the option to explain the value of performing additional analysis (despite potential delays). Dr Wong acknowledged that this approach could be a precursor to a conference call. By contrast, he suggested that proposing that the lead author simply accept the manuscript be published as is would exclude other authors’ views. Dr Wong felt that the final option was inappropriate, invalid, and “off-the-cuff”, as only statisticians (or other appropriately trained professionals) should conduct calculations, which may or may not require a new author.

Dr Wong concluded by highlighting the role of the publication professional in stakeholder mediation. As ever, open discussion is the key to success.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The number of highly prolific scientific authors is continuing to rise.
• Publishing behaviours could be monitored to detect unusual authorship patterns.

The number of extremely productive scientific authors is on the rise and may reflect an increase in “questionable research practices and fraud” – according to John Ioannidis, coauthor of a recent study posted on BioRxiv.

As reported in a Nature News article by Gemma Conroy, the study found that the number of extremely productive authors – defined as those who publish the equivalent of more than 60 papers a year – has almost quadrupled since a previous analysis carried out in 2018. This increase was surprising given that such high productivity levels had started to level off in 2014, said Ioannidis. Based on raw citation counts, extremely productive authors now account for 44% of the 10,000 most-cited authors across all areas of science.

To assess productivity levels in their new study, Ioannidis et al. counted all articles, reviews, and conference papers published between 2000 and 2022 and indexed in Scopus. They identified 12,624 extremely productive physicists (analysed separately due to their unique authorship practices) and 3,191 extremely productive scientists working in other areas. Topping this list was clinical medicine – perhaps unsurprising given that one in three scientists work in this field – which had 678 authors who published the equivalent of a paper at least once every 6 days during 2022.

678 authors working in clinical medicine published the equivalent of a paper at least once every 6 days during 2022.

The preprint authors speculate that a range of possible factors may explain the recent rise in extreme productivity across all research areas, including lax authorship practices, financial incentives, and paper mills. And while acknowledging that some highly prolific authors may be very talented, they caution that “spurious and unethical behaviours may also abound”. They call for unusual authorship patterns of individual scientists, teams, institutions, and countries to be monitored using centralised, standardised databases.

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KEY TAKEAWAY

• Researchers propose novel methods for ascribing authorship contributions, which involve assigning authorship to each result in a manuscript.

The last few years have seen concerted efforts to bring more consistency and quantification to the way that authorship and author contributions are assigned. In addition to existing tools such as Contributory Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), various bodies have suggested new methods to facilitate transparency and ensure authorship and author contributions are easily and appropriately assigned. These include the International Society for Medical Publications Professionals (ISMPP) authorship algorithm tool and initiatives such as the quantitative authorship decision support tool and Author Contribution Index. Now, Oded Rechavi and Pavel Tomancak provide an alternative method in a recent commentary published in Nature Reviews.

Rechavi and Tomancak’s approach involves assigning credit to each result in a manuscript. They “argue that it should be known who thought of each idea, who ran each experiment, and who analysed the data.” But how exactly would this be achieved? The authors propose two ways. Rechavi suggests substituting the word “we” for the names of specific, responsible authors. For instance, “we sequenced RNA” would become “Rechavi sequenced RNA”. Alternatively, Tomancak proposes assigning a number to each author in the author list and citing these for each contribution. For example, “we sequenced RNA¹” would credit the first author in the author list.

“It should be known who thought of each idea, who ran each experiment, and who analysed the data.”

The authors list multiple advantages of ascribing authorship to each result, irrespective of how it is achieved. These include:

• vague author contribution statements become redundant
• unexpected contributions are recognised (eg, theorists performing experimental work)
• the semi-quantitative data provided could help to justify or assign author order.

Nevertheless, they acknowledge several concerns raised by their peers, including:

• extra work will be needed to recall ‘who did what’ for each sentence
• reading the names of authors throughout a manuscript may be cumbersome
• disputes may arise when discussing who contributed to a specific study.

Rechavi and Tomancak counter this by calling on researchers to experiment with this alternative method in their own papers and suggest that bioRxiv, the preprint server, is an ideal place to try it out. They end with a clear call to action: ‘bottom-up’ adoption by the scientific community is needed to implement meaningful, lasting changes to the way in which author contributions are assigned.

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