Authorship : What ’ s in a Definition ?

Health and Human Services, and distributed to applicant or awardee institutions and PHS agencies to facilitate pursuit of a common interest in handling allegations of misconduct and promoting integrity in PHS-supported research. Misuse of authorship on scientific papers is not considered misconduct, although most of the reported cases of authorship disputes involve falsi-fication and/or fabrication of the contributions of the authors. Perhaps the reason for a less important place of authorship as a research integrity issue is the fact that there are no common definitions for authorship across scientific disciplines. The area of authorship has been dominated by the biomedical field, and many journals have adopted the definition of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which bases the authorship credit on A) (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, (2) acquisition of data, or (3) analysis and interpretation of data; B) (4) drafting the article or (5) revising it critically for important intellectual content; and C) (6) final approval of the version to be published. This definition identifies six contributions and their combination needed for authorship requirements: (1 OR 2 OR 3) AND (4 OR 5) AND 6. Since one can meet this criteria for authorship in six different ways (1+4+6: 2+4+6: 3+4+6, and so on) it is clear that different authors will use different standards and there is no real consistency. Outside of the biomedical field, the Boolean logic for authorship contributions completely changes. " [My] major concern is that false data will lead to changes in surgical practice regarding procedures " was the response from one author whose plagiarized paper was found by the Déjà vu project (http://spore. swmed.edu/dejavu). This author correctly pointed out that, as researchers and clinicians, we are guided by the literature, and if it is corrupt the results can be disastrous, affecting clinical decisions or research and career directions. The impact of publications that violate ethical norms goes further, resulting in tremendous misunderstandings ; wasting the time and energy of publishers, editors, and reviewers ; and skewing promotion decisions. The Déjà vu project was launched to exploit new text analysis and comparison techniques to identify, document , and study potential problems within the biomedical literature, indeed any literature, starting with Medline. The goals of this ongoing project are to develop resources for the quantitative study of highly