Is the system really broken

The qualifications for authorship established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) honour, at least at the minimum, traditional values of authorship: to be designated as an author, one must make substantial intellectual contributions to a project; participate in the writing or revision of the text; and approve the final manuscript. Ironically, whereas scholars in other disciplines have no trouble satisfying these minimum requirements, some scientists argue that the requirements are too rigorous, even unfair. Why should this be? Two explanations deserve scrutiny. First is the conceptual claim that because scientific authorship innately differs from authorship in other fields, scientists cannot be expected to fulfil the requirements expected of other authors. Second is the pragmatic claim that because awarding authorship credit in science has been so corrupted, the concept of scientific authorship should be abandoned and a new way found of awarding credit. Biagioli puts forward an interesting argument that scientific authorship is intrinsically different from authorship in other fields because scientific authors are reporting truth, which is in the public domain, rather than offering an original expression or a personal interpretation. To accept the basis for this argument, we would have to disregard the many examples of different interpretations of the same scientific data. Whether or not one believes that scientific truth is culturally constructed, research data are subject to analysis and interpretation that may be proven to be faulty by later researchers. Indeed, it is exactly this intellectual process of analysis and interpretation of data that is one of the ICMJE qualifications for authorship. A more compelling argument about the difference between scientific authorship and that in other fields relies on the difference in scale and in numbers of researchers involved in large projects. Nonetheless, there is some evidence in scientific fields such as high-particle physics that many researchers can still satisfy the ICMJE qualifications for authorship of a single article (E J Huth, personal communication). A common complaint is that scientists are forced to claim unearned authorship to receive academic rewards such as promotion and tenure. Yet scholars from other disciplines receive promotion and tenure without the huge number of publications that biomedical scientists, especially, have come to expect of their colleagues. Because the demand for large numbers of publications is an artefact of the scientific community, change must come from within that community. Honouring the ICMJE guidelines would be a good place to begin. Several US medical schools have now established authorship policies based on the ICMJE guidelines for authorship, and others are considering doing so. Such policies, as well as courses in research ethics, offer opportunities for discussion and education about the authorship. The articles began with the title of the study, followed by a subtitle to show that the paper was the report of a special Medical Research Council investigation, a report to the Medical Research Council from a committee, or a report by, of, or to such a committee (or subcommittee, working party, or other body designated to be responsible for the research). During the past two decades, authorship has been ascribed to every report, and the trend has been towards individual authorship. The way in which bibliographic databases have indexed these collaborative studies has also varied. Sometimes the phrase “No authors listed” is entered in the author field of MEDLINE records, with the name of the collective authorship (eg, the trial steering committee) incorporated with the title. Sometimes the names of individuals mentioned in the byline of the report (for example, the