Electronic and Computer Engineering Division, School of Engineering, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore, Singapore.
Account Res. 2011 Mar;18(2):91-101. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2011.557299.
Studies have indicated that academic research has become increasingly complex and multidisciplinary. There seems to be an increasing trend of multiple author articles published across most journals. As the field of biomedical engineering also encompasses multidisciplinary-based knowledge, it is interesting to understand the authorship trend over time. In this study, six journals were carefully chosen from the Journal Citation Report of the Thomson Scientific based on predefined criteria (year 1999 to 2008). The data pertaining to authorships for the articles published in these journals were then acquired from the PubMed database. The results show that there is a general upward trend for the number of author per article, but it is not significant (p > .01) despite a 64.5% increase in the total number of article published in the six chosen journals. Thus, the expected increase is not observed in this field, and it may be due to the stringent guidelines by journals in defining the contributions of an author. Particularly, contributing factors like the impact of authorship irregularities is discussed herein.
研究表明，学术研究变得越来越复杂和多学科化。似乎大多数期刊上发表的多作者文章呈上升趋势。由于生物医学工程领域也包含基于多学科的知识，因此了解其随时间的作者署名趋势很有意思。在这项研究中，根据预先设定的标准（1999 年至 2008 年），从汤姆森科学公司的期刊引文报告中仔细选择了六本期刊。然后从 PubMed 数据库中获取了这些期刊上发表的文章的作者数据。结果表明，每篇文章的作者数量呈普遍上升趋势，但尽管六本选定期刊上发表的文章总数增加了 64.5%，但这并不显著（p>.01）。因此，在这个领域并没有观察到预期的增长，这可能是由于期刊在定义作者的贡献方面有严格的指导方针。特别是，本文讨论了作者违规行为的影响等促成因素。
