Prevalence of honorary authorship based on self-declared contributor role taxonomy (CRediT) statements and agreement between current authorship recommendations

The purpose of the present meta-epidemiological study is (1) to identify the proportion of authors that, based on their self-declared contributions, did not met the minimum criteria for authorship as established by the ICMJE and McNutt recommendations, (2) to quantify the difference between these two recommendations, and (3) to identify the proportion of authors that contributed exclusively funding or materials to a study.
For this reason, we will perform a cross-sectional study of CRediT statements published in scholarly articles. We will contact three publishing companies, the Public Library of Sciences (PLoS), Elsevier, and Wiley to obtain CRediT statements. We will ask the publishers to provide every CRediT statement for every author of any article published in any of their journals. We will classify whether authors fulfilled minimum authorship recommendations advised by the ICMJE and by McNutt et al (2008) depending on the combination of items that they declared to have contributed in the CRediT statements. In addition, we will classify whether CRediT statements were suggestive of one specific authorship malpractice, that we defined “supply authorship”, and is characterized by providing exclusively funding or materials to a scholarly article. In order to define the combinations of items that are consider the minimum contribution to fulfil authorship recommendations, two investigators (ND, RMR) will independently evaluate the criteria for authorship (ICMJE, McNutt, “supply”) and develop a logical operation of CRediT items (using AND and OR) for each criterion. If there is persistent disagreement regarding the combinations, a third operator with methodological experience on authorship (VL) will be consulted as an arbiter.
The primary outcomes of this study will be:
- The proportion of authors that provided CRediT statements that did not suffice to justify authorship based on ICMJE recommendations
- The proportion of authors that provided CRediT statements that did not suffice to justify authorship based on McNutt recommendations
- The difference in these proportions
- The proportion of authors that based on the CRediT statements provided only funding and materials (supply authors)

本次元流行病学研究旨在（1）识别基于作者自行声明的贡献，未达到国际医学期刊编辑委员会（ICMJE）及McNutt建议设定的作者资格最低标准的作者比例，（2）量化这两项建议之间的差异，以及（3）识别仅提供资金或材料给研究但不具备实际贡献的作者比例。因此，本研究将对发表在学术期刊上的CRediT声明进行横断面研究。我们将联系三家出版公司——公共科学图书馆（PLoS）、Elsevier和Wiley，以获取CRediT声明。我们将要求出版商提供其旗下期刊中任何文章的每位作者的CRediT声明。根据作者在CRediT声明中声明的贡献组合，我们将对作者是否满足ICMJE和McNutt等（2008年）提出的最低作者资格建议进行分类。此外，我们还将对CRediT声明是否暗示存在一种特定的作者资格不当行为，我们将其定义为“供应作者资格”，其特征为仅向学术论文提供资金或材料。为了定义达到作者资格建议的最低贡献的组合，两位研究者（ND，RMR）将独立评估作者资格（ICMJE，McNutt，“供应”）的标准，并为每个标准开发CRediT项目的逻辑运算（使用AND和OR）。如果对于组合存在持续的分歧，将咨询具有作者资格方法论经验的第三位操作者（VL）作为仲裁者。本研究的主要结果包括：- 基于ICMJE建议，提供不足以证明作者资格的CRediT声明的作者比例- 基于McNutt建议，提供不足以证明作者资格的CRediT声明的作者比例- 这两个比例之间的差异- 基于CRediT声明，仅提供资金和材料（供应作者）的作者比例