[Sigmetrics] Letter to the Editor--published by the JBI

[Rajko]

Letter to the Editor

Rajko Igić

r.igic at excite.com

Department of Pharmacology, Medical Faculty, University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Academy of Arts and Sciences, 7800 Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina

To the Editor:
As the complexity of biomedical research has expanded over the past fifty years, many papers have reflected the emergence of team science along with the increasing number of authors involved. Readers, editors, reviewers, and external stakeholders would like to know how each author contributed to the study [1]. Generally, this information assigns the appropriate credit, recognition, and responsibility for the published research to each individual author. When two and more authors are involved, this information is indicated by the order of the authors, (provided the authors are not listed alphabetically), offering as well the corresponding author, contribution disclosers, and conflict of interest disclosures. This information also designates who is primarily responsible for the validity of the reported research. Yet, not all journals follow the desired pattern of reporting author participation, and the prominent author positions can vary greatly [2]. If the author order and contribution statements are not associated, and fail to provide information on the authors’ level of participation, a standardized author order may improve compliance.

Scientometrics, a discipline that seeks to measure research contributions of individual scientists, scientific institutions and individual countries, could determine how various factors influence scientific research [3]. A recent commentary in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI) has described a new system [4] that provides a metric (Z-score) for individual scientists that is based on the order of coauthors in the byline and as well as the corresponding author. This ranking of scientists, based on citations, may be further improved if a consistent order of authors in all biomedical journals is established. At a symposium in Banja Luka (September 2018), journal editors, scientists, reviewers, and scientometrists will consider whether this recommendation for coherent order of the authors in biomedical journals is feasible and likely to be adopted by scientific publishers and editors. If the meeting results in a broad consensus, such an agreement will be published as a recommendation in a peer-reviewed journal, and separately submitted to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

References
[1] P. Fontanarosa, H. Bauchner and A. Flanagin, Authorship and team science, JAMA 318, 2017, 2433–2437.
[2] H. Sauermann and C. Haeusser, Authorship and contribution disclosures, Sci. Adv. 3, 2017, e1700404.
[3] R. Igić, The influence of the civil war in Yugoslavia on publishing in peer-reviewed journals, Scientometrics 53, 2002, 47–52.
[4] E. Zerem, The ranking of scientists based on scientific publications assessment, J. Biomed. Inf. 75, 2017, 107–109.