Editorial: Research is a team sport: updated authorship guidelines for CORR

A national intervention to support frail older adults in primary care: a protocol for an adapted implementation framework

BACKGROUND

Older Canadians are high users of health care services, however the health care system is not well-designed to meet the complex needs of many older adults. Older persons often look to their primary care practitioners to assess their needs and coordinate their care. The intervention seeks to improve primary care for older persons living with frailty and will be implemented in six primary care clinics in three Canadian provinces. Presently, more than 1.6 million older Canadians are living with frailty, and this is projected to increase to 2.5 million within a decade (Canadian Frailty Network, Frailty Matters, 2020). The model will include frailty screening, an online portal to expedite referrals and improve coordination with community services, and several tools and techniques to support patient and family engagement and shared decision-making. Our project is guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) (Damschroder LJ, et al. Implement Scil, 4, 50, 2009). As others have done, we adapted the CFIR for our work. Our adapted framework combines elements of the socio-ecological model, key concepts from the CFIR, and elements from other implementation science frameworks. Nested within a broader mixed-method implementation study, the focus of this paper is to outline our guiding conceptual framework and qualitative methods protocol.

METHODS

We will use the adapted CFIR framework to inform the data we collect and our analytic approach. Our work is divided into three phases: (1) baseline assessment of 'usual care'; (2) tailoring and implementing a new primary care model; and (3) evaluation. In each of these phases we will engage in qualitative data collection, including clinical observations, focus groups, in-depth interviews and extensive field notes. At each site we will collect data with health care providers, key informants (e.g., executive directors), and rostered patients ≥ 70 years. We will engage in team-based analysis across multiple sites, three provinces and two languages through regular telephone conferences, a comprehensive analysis codebook, leadership from our Qualitative Working Group and a collective appreciation that "science is a team sport" (Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research 471, 701-702, 2013).

DISCUSSION

Outcomes of this research may be used by other research teams who chose to adapt the CFIR framework to reflect the unique contexts of their work, and clinicians seeking to implement our model, or other models of care for frail older patients in primary care.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

U.S. National Library of Medicine, NCT03442426 . Registered 22 February 2018- Retrospectively registered.

No room for ambiguity: The concepts of appropriate and inappropriate authorship in scientific publications

Authorship is the currency of an academic career. Scientific publications have significant academic and financial implications. Several standard authorship guidelines exist, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) is the most popular amongst them. There are increasing concerns about the ethics of publications with the rise of inappropriate authorship. The most important reason appears to be a lack of knowledge and awareness of the authorship guidelines and what actions constitute unethical behaviors. There is a need to incorporate standard guidelines in medical curricula and conduct structured training and education programs for researchers across the board. The current perspective describes the significant concepts of appropriate and inappropriate authorship, and the possible measures being formulated to shape the future of authorship.

"Conferring authorship": biobank stakeholders' experiences with publication credit in collaborative research

Background

Multi-collaborator research is increasingly becoming the norm in the field of biomedicine. With this trend comes the imperative to award recognition to all those who contribute to a study; however, there is a gap in the current “gold standard” in authorship guidelines with regards to the efforts of those who provide high quality biosamples and data, yet do not play a role in the intellectual development of the final publication.

Methods and findings

We carried out interviews with 36 individuals working in, or with links to, biobanks in Switzerland, in order to understand how they interpret, apply and value authorship criteria in studies involving biosamples. The majority of respondents feel that authorship is an important motivating factor in working and publishing collaboratively. However, our findings suggest that in some cases, authorship guidelines are being ignored in favor of departmental standards which recognize “scientific work” as meriting authorship.

Conclusions

Our results support the current calls in the literature for an alternative method of crediting biomaterial contributions, in order to ensure appropriate authorship inclusion and promote collaborative research involving biobanks.