Attitudes to, and practices of, scientific authorship vary. We have studied this variation among researchers in a university hospital and medical school in Norway.
We invited all faculty, researchers and PhD students at Oslo University Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo (approximately 2700) by e-mail to answer a web-based questionnaire in January 2013. We asked the researchers to report their authorship experiences and to score their agreement with, and ability to practice according to, 13 statements on authorship qualifications and criteria on a five-point Likert scale (1?=?completely agree, 5?=?completely disagree). The statements were taken from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and other recommendations on authorship.
654 questionnaires were returned (response rate 24%); 25% of the respondents had published less than five scientific articles, 43% five to 49, and 32% more than 50 articles. 97% reported knowledge of defined authorship criteria, and 68% regarded breaches of these as scientific misconduct. 36% had experienced pressure to include undeserved authors in their papers, more in basic science (46%) than in community medicine (25%). 29% reported that they had been denied authorship they believed they deserved. Researchers with less than six years of research experience found authorship decisions more difficult than more experienced researchers (48% vs 30%).The respondents' agreement with the statements on authorship was higher than their self-reported ability to follow them for all statements. Average scores for agreement and practice for all statements combined were 1.4 vs 2.3. The discrepancy between attitude and practice declined with publishing experience. For the core ICMJE authorship requirements the average difference between attitude and practice was 1.2 among those who had published less than 5 articles and 0.7 among those who had published 50 articles or more (p?
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The three claims put forward by Dr. Roger Poisson to rationalize his enrollment of ineligible subjects in clinical trials do not justify research fraud. None the less, certain lessons for the conduct of clinical research can be learned from the affair: experimental therapies should be made available to technically ineligible subjects when no effective therapy exists for their disease; further research must investigate the possible benefits of clinical-trial participation; broadly based, pragmatic trials must be regarded as the ideal model; and each eligibility criterion in a clinical-trial protocol should be justified.
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