Publish or perish CMAJ 1997;156:1382 See response from: H.D. Davies, et al I was pleased to see the 2 articles on authorship, "Rating authors' contributions to collaborative research: the PICNIC survey of university departments of pediatrics" (CMAJ 1996;155:877-82 [abstract / résumé]), by Drs. H. Dele Davies, Joanne M. Langley and David P. Speert, and "Authors: Who contributes what?" (CMAJ 1996;155:897-8 [full text / résumé]), by Dr. Bruce P. Squires. The definition of genuine authorship given by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors is clear. Although multiple authorship is appropriate for reports of collaborative research, multicentre trials and so on, in other types of articles main authors may be influenced to include additional authors inappropriately. Is it time to create some disincentives to counter the incentives for authorship inflation? In particular, academic institutions could adopt more formal evaluation criteria for authorship. One possible quantitative measure is a numerical score for each of an author's published articles. A score should have desirable mathematical properties and should be simple to calculate, explicit and widely accepted. As an example, let N be the rank order of the author in question on an article and let M be the total number of authors of that article. The score could be 1/N+1/M. The sole author of an article would receive a score of 2 (1/1+1/1=2). Two authors would share a total score of 2.5 (1/1+1/2=1.5 for the first author, and 1/2+1/2=1 for the second). As more authors are added, the total score to be divided among them would increase slowly, so that the score assigned to each preceding author would decline. A score like this could be summed for all of an author's articles in various publications, perhaps weighted according to the types of publications, and the total score could be converted to a rate by dividing it by the period under consideration (e.g., 3 years, or an entire career). Because scoring methods such as this one emphasize the number of articles published over the substance of those articles, perhaps a factor representing the importance of the articles should be included in the calculation. The number of citations of each article, who cited it and why, could help determine importance. Clearly, refinements in measuring productivity could provide disincentives to authorship inflation and incentives to make better use of acknowledgements in articles. However, such measures do not address the more fundamental issue: why authors should publish. Perhaps authors should challenge themselves to submit manuscripts only when they have something to share that is unique, mature and important. They should resist the culture of "publish or perish" and should be supported in this by their colleagues, peers and managers. Glenn Jones, MSc, MD Hamilton Regional Cancer Centre Department of Medicine McMaster University Hamilton, Ont. Send a letter to the editor responding to this letter Envoyez une lettre à la rédaction au sujet de cette lettre | CMAJ May 15, 1997 (vol 156, no 10) / JAMC le 15 mai 1997 (vol 156, no 10) |