The Relationship between author byline position and authors' statement roles in biomedical research articles

Shared authorship has become the norm rather than the exception in academic publishing. With the growing scale of research collaboration, the average number of authors per paper has increased drastically over the last decade. Count statistics on authors’ names in MEDLINE/PUBMED citations [4] indicate a multiplier effect from 2 authors per item in the early nineties to over 5 persons in recent years. Multi-authorship came with sensitiveness towards authorship position, since ranking is seen to mirror researcher’s commitment in the realization of the publication. Even alphabetic authorship listing does not necessarily imply that all authors contributed equally [2]. Where author order matters in case of research evaluation, bibliographic databases are equally expected to obey and represent byline positions and integrate new phenomenon such as joint first, last or corresponding author.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) stipulated that authorship credit should be based on (i) conception or design of the work or the acquisition, analysis, interpretation of data (ii) rafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content (iii) final approval of the version to be published [3]. No clear relationship is specified between task and order. The study of Bhandari et al. [1] demonstrates big variability in the perception of roles based on authorship order and the designation of the corresponding author. Also the position of group leader is demonstrated to be accorded various positions in the byline order [5]. Responding to uncertainty on author’s involvement, a number of high impact medical journals now mandate or advise authors to explicit their contribution in the form of authors’ statements, containing valuable information for bibliometricians, libarians and research evaluators with respect to the type of research involvement. The poster presents an empirical study based on a selection of full text articles sampled from the open access publisher BIOMED. Content analysis is applied on a set of authors’ statements extracted from 120 biomedical research articles. The study investigates different types of activities mentioned in the authors’ statements as well as the relationship between author byline position and the ICMJE activities on which authorship is claimed to be credited.