Elsevier

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 59, Issue 9, November 2004, Pages 1949-1954
Social Science & Medicine

Changes in authorship patterns in prestigious US medical journals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2004.02.029Get rights and content

Abstract

To improve identification of contributors to manuscripts, editors of medical journals have developed authorship responsibility criteria. Some have specified an acceptable number of authors per manuscript. We wanted to examine changes in patterns of authorship in the context of the development of these specifications. Therefore, we used a retrospective cohort design to calculate the average number of authors per manuscript and the prevalence of group and corporate authorship between 1980 and 2000 for original, scientific, non-serial articles published in four prestigious medical journals: the Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Group authorship identifies individual authors in the byline who are writing for a group; in corporate authorship, contributors are not individually listed in the byline.

We found that the number of authors per article increased dramatically over time in each journal, from an average of 4.5 in 1980 to 6.9 in 2000 across journals. As a proportion of published manuscripts, group authorship (authors listed in the byline) increased from virtually zero to over 15%, while corporate authorship (authors not listed in the byline) remained rare and stagnant. Manuscripts published by single authors all but vanished. Group authorship was most prevalent in journals that limited the acceptable number of authors per manuscript.

These findings suggest that the number of authors per manuscript continues to grow. The growth in the number of authors on bylines and the proportion of group-authored manuscripts is likely to reflect the increasing complexity of medical research.

Section snippets

Methods

We examined journals whose editors were likely to be concerned about appropriate identification of authors. We reasoned that editors of journals with high prestige, high visibility, and strong brand name recognition would have such concerns. Therefore, we limited our analysis to four United States general medical journals that were prestigious (defined by having high manuscript rejection rates), highly visible (defined by an annual circulation above 75,000 in 2000 as determined by Ulrich's

Results

The total number of articles that met our inclusion criteria varied across journals and time (Fig. 1). The Journal of the American Medical Association most consistently published original, scientific, non-serial manuscripts across the years (range 143–207). Archives of Internal Medicine exhibited the greatest variation in publication of such articles (range 115–288).

The average number of authors per article increased dramatically over time in all journals (Fig. 2). Across the four journals, the

Comment

Examining over 14,000 manuscripts published in prestigious United States medical journals over a 21 year period, we found that the number of authors per published original article is increasing. Over the time period examined, the practice of group authorship has become much more prevalent, while single authorship of published research articles has all but vanished. Group authorship is a much more common method than corporate authorship for group writing. We were intrigued to find that

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