Changes in authorship patterns in prestigious US medical journals☆
Section snippets
Methods
We examined journals whose editors were likely to be concerned about appropriate identification of authors. We reasoned that editors of journals with high prestige, high visibility, and strong brand name recognition would have such concerns. Therefore, we limited our analysis to four United States general medical journals that were prestigious (defined by having high manuscript rejection rates), highly visible (defined by an annual circulation above 75,000 in 2000 as determined by Ulrich's
Results
The total number of articles that met our inclusion criteria varied across journals and time (Fig. 1). The Journal of the American Medical Association most consistently published original, scientific, non-serial manuscripts across the years (range 143–207). Archives of Internal Medicine exhibited the greatest variation in publication of such articles (range 115–288).
The average number of authors per article increased dramatically over time in all journals (Fig. 2). Across the four journals, the
Comment
Examining over 14,000 manuscripts published in prestigious United States medical journals over a 21 year period, we found that the number of authors per published original article is increasing. Over the time period examined, the practice of group authorship has become much more prevalent, while single authorship of published research articles has all but vanished. Group authorship is a much more common method than corporate authorship for group writing. We were intrigued to find that
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