engleski

Reliability of disclosure forms of authors' contributions

Contribution disclosure forms used by medical journals for assessing authorship are surveys of self-reported behaviour and follow cognitive rules of psychometric instruments. We assessed how autobiographic memory affected the reliability of authorship contribution forms for judging the authorship of research articles. In a prospective study which included 919 authors of 201 articles submitted to a general medical journal, contribution disclosure form with 11 possible contribution choices for all authors was first sent to the corresponding author, who filled it out for all authors, and then to all authors of the same article. Main Outcome Measure: Test-retest differences (gross difference rate, GDR) of the contribution choices between the declarations for the same article at two time points. More than two thirds of corresponding authors (70%) differed in at least one contribution choice between two disclosure statements. The reliability of their answers was low to moderate, especially for contributions o provision of study materials/patients or final approval of the article (GDR=22.9%), guarantor of the study (GDR=20.9%), or drafting of the manuscript (GDR=20.4 %). As a proxy for their co-authors’ contributions, corresponding authors also differed from their co-authors in the perception of non-corresponding authors’ contributions, disagreeing in 69.4% cases. Out of 718 non-corresponding authors, 204 (28.4%) met all criteria for authorship of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors according to statement given by the corresponding author. When they described their own contributions, this prevalence increased to 40.5%. Psychological factors, such as autobiographic memory, may confound contribution disclosures as an evaluation of authorship on scientific articles and affect responsible authorship practices.

authorship; journals

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