Shapiro D W, Wenger N S, Shapiro M F
Division of General Internal Medicine, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Los Angeles, Calif.
JAMA. 1994 Feb 9;271(6):438-42.
To determine the contributions of each author to multiauthored biomedical research papers.
Mailed, self-administered survey.
A total of 184 first authors from a consecutive sample of 200 papers with four or more authors published in 10 leading biomedical journals.
First authors' ratings of which authors had made substantial contributions to the following: initial conception of the study, design of the study, provision of needed resources, collection of data, analysis and interpretation of data, and writing the first draft of the paper or revising drafts for important intellectual content.
The contributions of nonfirst authors varied greatly within and among papers. Even second and last authors--though they generally contributed more than other nonfirst authors--were markedly inconsistent in the extent and pattern of their contributions. Time spent on the research differed among authors by orders of magnitude. An appreciable number of authors made few or no substantial contributions to the research.
The nature and extent of contributions of nonfirst authors to biomedical research reported in multiauthored papers cannot reliably be discerned (or discounted) by authorship or order of authors. The two core purposes of scientific authorship--to confer credit and denote responsibility for research--are not adequately being met by these authorship practices.
确定每位作者对多作者生物医学研究论文的贡献。
邮寄式自填调查问卷。
从10种主要生物医学期刊上发表的200篇有4名及以上作者的论文的连续样本中选取的184名第一作者。
第一作者对以下方面做出重大贡献的作者的评分：研究的初步构思、研究设计、提供所需资源、数据收集、数据分析与解读，以及撰写论文初稿或对重要学术内容进行稿件修订。
非第一作者的贡献在不同论文之间以及同一论文内部差异很大。即使是第二作者和最后一位作者——尽管他们通常比其他非第一作者贡献更多——在贡献程度和模式上也明显不一致。作者在研究上花费的时间相差几个数量级。相当数量的作者对研究几乎没有或没有做出重大贡献。
多作者论文中报道的非第一作者对生物医学研究的贡献性质和程度，无法通过作者身份或作者顺序可靠地辨别（或忽略）。科学作者身份的两个核心目的——给予认可和表明对研究的责任——在这些作者身份实践中没有得到充分实现。
