An Ethical Exploration of Increased Average Number of Authors Per Publication

Impact of COVID-19 on Scholarly Outcomes of Pharmacy Practice Faculty by Gender and Academic Rank

OBJECTIVE

To determine how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the scholarly outcomes of pharmacy practice faculty and whether the impact varied by gender and academic rank.

METHODS

Pharmacy practice faculty from the top 50 National Institutes of Health-funded schools of pharmacy (2018-2021) were included. Faculty whose gender was indeterminable with Gender API or who had no Scopus record were excluded. Publications before and during the pandemic (2018-2019 and 2020-2021, respectively) were obtained from Scopus. Primary outcomes included scholarly activity (probability of publishing) and scholarly output (number of documents published). The secondary outcomes were fractional scholarly output and collaboration coefficient. Data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models, with fixed effects including pandemic, rank, and gender. Interaction effects were only included in final models if statistically significant.

RESULTS

Faculty included were 1081 (61.2% women: 31.4%, 40.0%, and 28.7% assistant, associate, and professors, respectively). Unique documents published increased from 2428 to 2737 during the pandemic. There was a significant pandemic-rank interaction in scholarly activity, whereas scholarly output had both pandemic-rank and pandemic-gender interactions. Men had higher scholarly output vs women across all ranks, in both periods. During the pandemic, scholarly output increased among all assistants and associates, but among professors, men had no change, whereas women had a decrease.

CONCLUSION

The pandemic effect on pharmacy practice faculty scholarly outcomes varied across gender and academic ranks. Institutions should implement initiatives to mitigate the extant gender gap in scholarly output that persisted during the pandemic, as it may impact career progression, tenure prospects, and retention.

Mega-authorship implications: How many scientists can fit into one cell?

The past 20 years has seen a significant increase in articles with 500 or more authors. This increase has presented problems in terms of determining true authorship versus other types of contribution, issues with database metadata and data output, and publication length. Using items with 500+ authors deemed as mega-author titles, a total of 5,533 mega-author items were identified using InCites. Metadata about the items was then gathered from Web of Science and Scopus. Close examination of these items found that the vast majority of these covered physics topics, with medicine a far distant second place and only minor representation from other science fields. This mega-authorship saw significant events that appear to correspond to similar events in the Large Hadron Collider's timeline, indicating that the projects for the collider are driving this heavy output. Some solutions are offered for the problems resulting from this phenomenon, partially driven by recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

Clarifying middle authorship contributions to reduce abuses in science publishing and assessment of top-ranked SJR biochemistry and pharmacology journals' authorship criteria

So-called "middle authors," being neither the first, last, nor corresponding author of an academic paper, have made increasing relative contributions to academic scholarship over recent decades. No work has specifically and explicitly addressed the roles, rights, and responsibilities of middle authors, an authorship position which we believe is particularly vulnerable to abuse via growing phenomena such as paper mills. Responsible middle authorship requires transparent declarations of intellectual and other scientific contributions that journals can and should require of co-authors and established guidelines and criteria to achieve this already exist (ICMJE/CRediT). Although publishers, editors, and authors need to collectively uphold a situation of shared responsibility for appropriate co-authorship, current models have failed science since verification of authorship is impossible, except through blind trust in authors' statements. During the retraction of a paper, while the opinion of individual co-authors might be noted in a retraction notice, the retraction itself practically erases the relevance of co-author contributions and position/status (first, leading, senior, last, co-corresponding, etc.). Paper mills may have successfully proliferated because individual authors' roles and responsibilities are not tangibly verifiable and are thus indiscernible. We draw on a historical example of manipulated research to argue that authors and editors should publish publicly available, traceable contributions to the intellectual content of an article-both classical authorship or technical contributions-to maximize both visibility of individual contributions and accountability. To make our article practically more relevant to this journal's readership, we reviewed the top 50 Q1 journals in the fields of biochemistry and pharmacology, as ranked by the SJR, to appreciate which journals adopted the ICMJE or CRediT schools of authorship contribution, finding significant variation in adhesion to ICMJE guidelines nor the CRediT criteria and wording of author guidelines.

A systematic scoping review of the ethics of Contributor Role Ontologies and Taxonomies

Contributor Role Ontologies and Taxonomies (CROTs) provide a standard list of roles to specify individual contributions to research. CROTs most common application has been their inclusion alongside author bylines in scholarly publications. With the recent uptake of CROTs among publishers -particularly the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT)- some have anticipated a positive impact on ethical issues regarding the attribution of credit and responsibilities, but others have voiced concerns about CROTs shortcomings and ways they could be misunderstood or have unintended consequences. Since these discussions have never been consolidated, this review collated and explored published viewpoints about the ethics of CROTs. After searching Ovid Medline, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, 30 papers met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed. We identified eight themes and 20 specific issues related to the ethics of CROTs and provided four recommendations for CROT developers, custodians, or others seeking to use CROTs in their workflows, policy and practice: 1) Compile comprehensive instructions that explain how CROTs should be used; 2) Improve the coherence of used terms, 3) Translate roles in languages other than English, 4) Communicate a clear vision about future development plans and be transparent about CROTs' strengths and weaknesses. We conclude that CROTs are not the panacea for unethical attributions and should be complemented with initiatives that support social and infrastructural transformation of scholarly publications.

Messing with Merton: The intersection between open science practices and Mertonian values

Although adherence to Mertonian values of science (i.e., communism, universalism, organized skepticism, disinterestedness) is desired and promoted in academia, such adherence can cause friction with the normative structures and practices of Open Science. Mertonian values and Open Science practices aim to improve the conduct and communication of research and are promoted by institutional actors. However, Mertonian values remain mostly idealistic and contextualized in local and disciplinary cultures and Open Science practices rely heavily on third-party resources and technology that are not equally accessible to all parties. Furthermore, although still popular, Mertonian values were developed in a different institutional and political context. In this article, we argue that new normative structures for science need to look beyond nostalgia and consider aspirations and outcomes of Open Science practices. To contribute to such a vision, we explore the intersection of several Open Science practices with Mertonian values to flesh out challenges involved in upholding these values. We demonstrate that this intersection becomes complicated when the interests of numerous groups collide and contrast. Acknowledging and exploring such tensions informs our understanding of researchers' behavior and supports efforts that seek to improve researchers' interactions with other normative structures such as research ethics and integrity frameworks.

Group authorship, an excellent opportunity laced with ethical, legal and technical challenges

Group authorship (also known as corporate authorship, team authorship, consortium authorship) refers to attribution practices that use the name of a collective (be it team, group, project, corporation, or consortium) in the authorship byline. Data shows that group authorships are on the rise but thus far, in scholarly discussions about authorship, they have not gained much specific attention. Group authorship can minimize tensions within the group about authorship order and the criteria used for inclusion/exclusion of individual authors. However, current use of group authorships has drawbacks, such as ethical challenges associated with the attribution of credit and responsibilities, legal challenges regarding how copyrights are handled, and technical challenges related to the lack of persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as ORCID, for groups. We offer two recommendations: 1) Journals should develop and share context-specific and unambiguous guidelines for group authorship, for which they can use the four baseline requirements offered in this paper; 2) Using persistent identifiers for groups and consistent reporting of members' contributions should be facilitated through devising PIDs for groups and linking these to the ORCIDs of their individual contributors and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the published item.

A global overview of midwives' working conditions: A rapid review of literature on positive practice environment

BACKGROUND

In the United Kingdom (UK), a critical shortage of midwives puts pressure on the already overworked midwives working in maternity services. Considering the challenges that midwives in the UK face, this rapid review was conducted to inform a larger-scale initiative to improve the working conditions of midwives in an acute NHS Trust in the Midlands area of the UK.

OBJECTIVE

To describe midwives' perceptions and experiences of positive practice environments.

METHODS

A search strategy to identify literature about midwives' perceptions and experiences of positive practice environments was conducted in Medline, CINAHL Plus and Embase databases. Literature screening was conducted independently in two steps using an eligibility tool. The articles' quality assessment was conducted using the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool. Data were extracted using the Job Quality framework and managed using NVivo12.

RESULTS

Seventy articles were included in this review. Midwives' working conditions can be improved in all seven areas of the Job Quality framework. Most articles in the review reported the negative aspects of midwives' working environments, making it challenging for the team to define a positive practice environment for midwives. Despite this, authors discuss that a positive practice environment is at least sustained by ensuring midwives' ability to provide care; providing good employment conditions; developing respectful organisations; and increasing team resources, such as those that improve team resilience.

CONCLUSIONS

Midwives' working conditions are universally challenging. Failure to address the situation will compromise recruitment and retention, increasing the shortage of midwives. Provision of safe and respectful care appears to be directly linked to midwives' safe and respectful working conditions.

The ethics of disclosing the use of artificial intelligence tools in writing scholarly manuscripts

In this article, we discuss ethical issues related to using and disclosing artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs), to write or edit scholarly manuscripts. Some journals, such as Science, have banned the use of LLMs because of the ethical problems they raise concerning responsible authorship. We argue that this is not a reasonable response to the moral conundrums created by the use of LLMs because bans are unenforceable and would encourage undisclosed use of LLMs. Furthermore, LLMs can be useful in writing, reviewing and editing text, and promote equity in science. Others have argued that LLMs should be mentioned in the acknowledgments since they do not meet all the authorship criteria. We argue that naming LLMs as authors or mentioning them in the acknowledgments are both inappropriate forms of recognition because LLMs do not have free will and therefore cannot be held morally or legally responsible for what they do. Tools in general, and software in particular, are usually cited in-text, followed by being mentioned in the references. We provide suggestions to improve APA Style for referencing ChatGPT to specifically indicate the contributor who used LLMs (because interactions are stored on personal user accounts), the used version and model (because the same version could use different language models and generate dissimilar responses, e.g., ChatGPT May 12 Version GPT3.5 or GPT4), and the time of usage (because LLMs evolve fast and generate dissimilar responses over time). We recommend that researchers who use LLMs: (1) disclose their use in the introduction or methods section to transparently describe details such as used prompts and note which parts of the text are affected, (2) use in-text citations and references (to recognize their used applications and improve findability and indexing), and (3) record and submit their relevant interactions with LLMs as supplementary material or appendices.

"Technical" Contributors and Authorship Distribution in Health Science

In health sciences, technical contributions may be undervalued and excluded in the author byline. In this paper, I demonstrate how authorship is a historical construct which perpetuates systemic injustices including technical undervaluation. I make use of Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual work to demonstrate how the power dynamics at play in academia make it very challenging to change the habitual state or "habitus". To counter this, I argue that we must reconceive technical contributions to not be a priori less important based on its nature when assigning roles and opportunities leading to authorship. I make this argument based on two premises. First, science has evolved due to major information and biotechnological innovation; this requires 'technicians' to acquire and exercise a commensurate high degree of both technical and intellectual expertise which in turn increases the value of their contribution. I will illustrate this by providing a brief historical view of work statisticians, computer programmers/data scientists and laboratory technicians. Second, excluding or undervaluing this type of work is contrary to norms of responsibility, fairness and trustworthiness of the individual researchers and of teams in science. Although such norms are continuously tested because of power dynamics, their importance is central to ethical authorship practice and research integrity. While it may be argued that detailed disclosure of contributions (known as contributorship) increases accountability by clearly identifying who did what in the publication, I contend that this may unintentionally legitimize undervaluation of technical roles and may decrease integrity of science. Finally, this paper offers recommendations to promote ethical inclusion of technical contributors.

Exploring high scientific productivity in international co-authorship of a small developing country based on collaboration patterns

The number of published scientific paper grows rapidly each year, totaling more than 2.9 million annually. New methodologies and systems have been developed to analyze scientific production and performance indicators from large quantities of data available from the scientific databases, such as Web of Science or Scopus. In this paper, we analyzed the international scientific production and co-authorship patterns for the most productive authors from Serbia based on the obtained Web of Science dataset in the period 2006-2013. We performed bibliometric and scientometric analyses together with statistical and collaboration network analysis, to reveal the causes of extraordinary publishing performance of some authors. For such authors, we found significant inequality in distribution of papers over journals and countries of co-authors, using Gini coefficient and Lorenz curves. Most of the papers belong to multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and the field of applied sciences. We have discovered three specific collaboration patterns that lead to high productivity in international collaboration. First pattern corresponds to mega-authorship papers with hundreds of co-authors gathered in specific research groups. The other two collaboration patterns were found in mathematics and multidisciplinary science, mainly application of graph theory and computational methods in physical chemistry. The former pattern results in a star-shaped collaboration network with mostly individual collaborators. The latter pattern includes multiple actors with high betweenness centrality measure and identified brokerage roles. The results are compared with the later period 2014-2023, where high scientific production has been observed in some other fields, such as biology and food science and technology.

Trends in authorship characteristics and collaboration in pharmacy practice publications: 2011-2020

BACKGROUND

Research and scholarly publications are core expectations in academia that often require collaboration. While the number of authors per document (NAPD) has increased in every discipline, co-authorship culture and collaboration patterns vary among disciplines and countries.

OBJECTIVES

To determine the trends in the patterns and characteristics of authorship and collaborations in United States' pharmacy practice faculty publications from 2011 to 2020.

METHODS

Seven pharmacy practice journals were selected based on previous studies and data from Scimago Journal and Country Rank. Articles and reviews (document types) published during the decade were obtained from the Scopus database. Data cleaning and analysis were done using Microsoft Excel, R programming language packages, and VOSviewer. The Mann-Kendall trend test was used to determine the presence of (positive/negative) monotonic trends.

RESULTS

Eight thousand and fifty-nine documents published in the selected journals (82.7% articles; 17.3% reviews) by 18,575 unique authors during the decade were analyzed. In most documents (69.3-78.7%), senior/corresponding authors were first authors. There were statistically significant upward trends in the mean NAPD (3.8 ± 2.2 to 4.7 ± 2.4), median NAPD, and related bibliometric indices (degree of collaboration, collaborative index, and collaborative coefficient). Conversely, productivity (document per unique author) significantly trended downward and had a strong, negative correlation with mean NAPD. The proportion of one-author publications also trended downward (12.2%-3.6%). Evidence also supports a downward trend in institutional collaboration and an upward trend in international collaboration.

CONCLUSIONS

The assumption that last authors are senior authors does not hold in pharmacy practice publications. The increase in NAPD is not considered as authorship inflation, but rather an authorship "upcreep" that is driven by a survival strategy to publish together, predominantly within institutions rather than across institutions or countries. Therefore, faculty publication benchmarks should be crafted to mitigate the inverse relationship between collaboration and productivity, without discouraging collaboration.

Perish and publish: Dynamics of biomedical publications by deceased authors

The question of whether it is appropriate to attribute authorship to deceased individuals of original studies in the biomedical literature is contentious. Authorship guidelines utilized by journals do not provide a clear consensus framework that is binding on those in the field. To guide and inform the implementation of authorship frameworks it would be useful to understand the extent of the practice in the scientific literature, but studies that have systematically quantified the prevalence of this phenomenon in the biomedical literature have not been performed to date. To address this issue, we quantified the prevalence of publications by deceased authors in the biomedical literature from the period 1990-2020. We screened 2,601,457 peer-reviewed papers from the full text Europe PubMed Central database. We applied natural language processing, stringent filtering and manual curation to identify a final set of 1,439 deceased authors. We then determined these authors published a total of 38,907 papers over their careers with 5,477 published after death. The number of deceased publications has been growing rapidly, a 146-fold increase since the year 2000. This rate of increase was still significant when accounting for the growing total number of publications and pool of authors. We found that more than 50% of deceased author papers were first submitted after the death of the author and that over 60% of these papers failed to acknowledge the deceased authors status. Most deceased authors published less than 10 papers after death but a small pool of 30 authors published significantly more. A pool of 266 authors published more than 90% of their total publications after death. Our analysis indicates that the attribution of deceased authorship in the literature is not an occasional occurrence but a burgeoning trend. A consensus framework to address authorship by deceased scientists is warranted.