Weeks William B, Wallace Amy E, Kimberly B C Surott
Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2004 Nov;59(9):1949-54. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2004.02.029.
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.
为了更好地识别稿件的作者贡献，医学期刊编辑制定了作者责任标准。一些期刊规定了每篇稿件可接受的作者数量。我们想研究在这些标准制定的背景下作者署名模式的变化。因此，我们采用回顾性队列设计，计算了1980年至2000年期间在四种著名医学期刊上发表的原创性、科学性、非系列文章的每篇稿件平均作者数量以及团体作者和集体作者的比例，这四种期刊分别是《内科学年鉴》《内科学文献》《美国医学会杂志》和《新英格兰医学杂志》。团体作者是指在署名中为某个团体写作的个体作者；在集体作者情况下，稿件贡献者不在署名中单独列出。我们发现，随着时间推移，每种期刊的每篇文章作者数量都大幅增加，从1980年的平均4.5人增加到2000年各期刊的平均6.9人。作为已发表稿件的比例，团体作者（署名中的作者）从几乎为零增加到超过15%，而集体作者（未在署名中列出的作者）仍然很少且停滞不前。单作者发表的稿件几乎消失了。团体作者在限制每篇稿件可接受作者数量的期刊中最为普遍。这些发现表明，每篇稿件的作者数量仍在持续增长。署名作者数量的增加以及团体署名稿件比例的上升可能反映了医学研究日益复杂的情况。
