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Individual scientific credit in occupational medicine research: ethical and technical issues.

Basic and applied research are core components of economic growth, sustainable development and the social welfare of countries. In response to the changing needs and requirements of the population’s health, governments are committed to improving the competitiveness of scientific and academic systems through transparent and effective evaluation thus allowing allocation of necessary resources. The mechanism of competition requires the evaluation of scientific performance of research institutes, departments, research groups and individuals through the assessment of scientific credit [1]. The evaluation of credit in academic performance includes ethical and technical aspects, which are subjected to constructive criticism by the scientific community and require constant updating. A recent report by the UK parliamentary Science and Technology Committee, examines pre-peer review as a crucial element to the reliability of scientific research and post-peer review as an opportunity to experiment with new media and social networking solutions [2]. The report warns that research institutions ‘should be cautious not to attach too much weight to publications in high-impact journals’ when assessing individuals for recruitment and career promotion. There are a number of ethical criteria authors need to meet when submitting their scientific publications (products) to journals. These are the declaration of potential conflicts of interest, avoidance of redundant publication of data or duplication of contributions, copying or manipulation of data and communicating the funding source amongst others. There is also the important consideration of defining individual contributions by each author, as first observed in The Lancet in 1982 [3]. Although different criteria have been developed, more recently they have been formalized by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). ICMJE has recommended that scientific journals develop policies to clarify the contribution of authors and that an author, to be defined as such, should meet all the following requirements: (i) have contributed to the conception and design of the study or to the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data, (ii) have provided the first draft or have critically contributed to the content and (iii) have approved the final version of the paper [4]. Furthermore, ICMJE suggested that the contribution of those who had participated in the survey through technical advice, data collection, language support or general support could be recognized in an acknowledgements section at the end of the article. Such policies are being increasingly implemented by ICMJE member journals and the editorial policies increasingly require an explicit description of the contribution of each author. Whereas the criteria for the definition of authorship and for the inclusion of researchers among the authors of the publication are now well defined, there is greater uncertainty on how to apportion credit to each author of a paper. In fact, usually co-authors do not equally contribute to a paper and their list establishes accountability as well credit to them. Indeed, there is a different perception of the scientific credit of the author in relation to their position in the paper’s title and, in general, the authors in the first or last position are regarded as deserving greatest scientific credit [5]. The first author is generally considered as being in the key position, as implicitly shown by the fact that if the first two authors have equally contributed to the research, it is normally stated that the ‘authors contributed equally’. It is generally felt that the first and the last author in a three-author paper deserve most credit, the first for the work performed and the last for the initial conception and supervision. A large number of authors is thought to reduce the scientific credit of each participant and the middle positions make it difficult to appreciate the actual level of individual contribution, especially in publications inflated by the number of coauthors [6]. The number of authors of scientific papers is a topic that generates its own research. I carried out a survey of scientific papers published between 2004 and 2008 by 40 Italian full professors of occupational medicine [7] and found the average number of authors per publication to be 6.6 (median 6, minimum 1, maximum 14). This finding is consistent with other research showing that the average number of authors per paper published in core occupational health journals [8] has increased gradually over the years, on average from less than three authors per publication in the years around 1950 to about four in the 1980s and to more than five in recent years [9]. Despite this trend and in comparison with other journals of the discipline, Occupational Medicine is the journal with the highest proportion of single-author articles and the lowest average number of authors per article. This may reflect its focus on publishing practically orientated research and research from practising physicians including case reports. Most mainstream journals choose not to publish case reports as these papers are less likely to be cited and therefore ‘dilute’ their impact factor. Occupational Medicine has also taken the conscious decision to