Authorship Considerations for Publishing in Pharmacy Education Journals

Managing the "Three Cs" of Academic Literature Authorship: Contributions, Credit, and Conflict

Dissemination of information through publications is central to academic research, as well as professional advancement. Although seemingly a straightforward endeavor, publication authorship may present challenges. Although the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors defines authorship based on 4 required criteria, contemporary interdisciplinary collaborations can complicate authorship determinations. However, communication that occurs early and frequently in the research and writing process can help to prevent or mitigate potential conflicts, while a process for defining authorship contributions can aid in awarding proper credit. The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) defines 14 essential roles of manuscript authors that can be utilized to characterize individual author contributions toward any given publication. This information is useful for academic administrators when evaluating contributors of faculty during promotion and tenure decisions. In the era of collaborative scientific, clinical, and pedagogical scholarship, providing faculty development, including statements of credit in the published work, and developing institutional systems to capture and assess contributions are key.

Pharmacy Practice Research in Saudi Arabia; A Bibliometrics Analysis from (2000 to 2021)

Background

Pharmacy is a growing profession in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which has experienced tremendous changes in the past 20 years. Pharmacy practice or clinical pharmacy have an attention ever since the emerging of PharmD programs throughout the Saudi universities. As a result, the number of affiliated faculty in the pharmacy practice departments has increased dramatically in the past 20 years and thus significant changes in research output were observed.

Objectives

The main objective is to conduct a bibliometric analysis and evaluate the research output of pharmacy practice faculty in Saudi Universities from 2000 to 2021

Methods

A systematic search was conducted using Scopus database to explore the research output from pharmacy practice affiliated faculty from 2000 to 2021. The following search terms AFFILORG (“Pharmacy Practice Department” OR “Department of Pharmacy practice” OR “Clinical Pharmacy Department” OR “Department of Clinical Pharmacy” OR “Department of Pharmacy Services”) AND AFFILCOUNTRY (“Saudi Arabia” OR “KSA” OR “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”) were used. Only original research papers were retrieved and analyzed using MS Excel (v16.0), MS Access (v16.0), Bibexcel (v2017), VOS viewer, and Biblioshiny.

Results

In the past two decades, most publications with pharmacy practice departments affiliation were pharmacy practice research irrelevant (only 1075 out of 2809). King Saud University and King Abdulaziz University were the top performing institutes, and median of 5-year impact factor for journals was more than 3 for most of the top 10 institutes. 19% of the total retrieved articles were review publications were the rest majorly classified as cross-sectional studies.

Conclusion

The research contribution of pharmacy practice departments in Saudi Arabia has been improving. Key recommendations are to promote more applied and interventional research, increase publications in top journals, and enhance national collaborations.

Educational research and scholarship - Brainstorming, developing, and publishing together as teams

INTRODUCTION

Collaborative educational research and scholarship is a powerful tool to help schools/colleges of pharmacy learn from and with each other to continuously improve by sharing best practices.

COMMENTARY

There are significant advantages including developing projects with more generalizability and impact, leveraging different and complementary expertise, informal mentorship of junior faculty researchers, task sharing, and group accountability. There are also challenges such as managing multiple participants, sticking to productivity goals and timelines, and scheduling virtual meetings across multiple time zones.

IMPLICATIONS

For a number of years, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy's Assessment Special Interest Group has intentionally created opportunities for new connections with the purpose of fostering scholarship projects to pursue interesting questions and engage in educational research with other like-minded colleagues. The purpose of this commentary is to share with members of the academy several practical tips for leading and engaging in group projects of educational scholarship.

Characterizing Research About Interprofessional Education Within Pharmacy

Objective. To determine how interprofessional education (IPE) in pharmacy has been studied, namely which disciplines have engaged in IPE research initiatives, the research methodologies that have been used, and what journals have published in this area.Findings. In the 145 IPE studies included in the review, the authors represented 13 different disciplines (3.2±1.5 disciplines per study). Pharmacy authors most commonly published with co-authors from nursing, medicine, and health management and support and most frequently served as first author or last author. The IPE activities involved 4.0 student disciplines (SD = 1.9) and 211.8 students (SD = 280.1), and most commonly included nursing (n = 104, 71.7%), medicine (n = 102, 70.3%), and health management and support students (n = 50, 34.5%). Most studies did not include an author from each student discipline involved in the IPE (n = 88, 60.7%). Further, a majority of studies used nonrandomized groupings (n = 103, 71.0%) with quantitative data (n = 74, 51.0%) and most were published in an interprofessional journal (n = 65, 44.8%) or pharmacy-specific journal (n = 45, 31.0%).Summary. Pharmacists have increased their engagement in IPE research as demonstrated by the number of articles published and authorship order position. However, mismatches between student disciplines and author disciplines on published papers elucidate opportunities to foster collaborations that position students for success within a collaborative healthcare environment.

Knowledge and Perceptions of Honorary Authorship among Health Care Researchers: Online Cross-sectional Survey Data from the Middle East

One of the core problems of scientific research authorship is honorary authorship. It violates the ethical principle of clear and appropriate assignment of scientific research contributions. The prevalence of honorary authorship worldwide is alarmingly high across various research disciplines. As a result, many academic institutions and publishers were trying to explore ways to overcome this unethical research practice. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommended criteria for authorship as guidance for researchers submitting manuscripts to biomedical Journals. However, despite the ICMJE guidelines, honorary authorship is still significantly present across various health research disciplines. The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions and knowledge of health care researchers towards honorary authorship according to the ICMJE guidelines across different health care fields in Jordan, which to our knowledge was never explored before. Data from an electronic survey that was distributed among researchers working in different healthcare fields across several major universities in Jordan, revealed that most of the respondents were assistant professors working mainly in the schools of Medicine and Pharmacy. The majority of the respondents (65.5%) were not aware of the ICMJE authorship guidelines. And, around 37% reported the inclusion of an honorary author, in which the most common non-authorship task reported by 73% of the respondents was reviewing the manuscript. Our findings emphasize the need for national academic and research institutions to address the issue of authorship in their educational programs and internal policies.

Factors influencing pharmacy faculty behavior, perceptions, and challenges with determining authorship credit

INTRODUCTION

This study aimed to identify challenges in determining authorship and author order, factors and criteria that influence behavior in determining authorship and author order, and beliefs about authorship and familiarity with guidelines among pharmacy faculty.

METHODS

An online survey was emailed to faculty from three groups of schools categorized by degree of external research funding. Academic discipline and rank, tenure status, years in rank, and gender were queried. Questions were created to determine frequency of authorship justification and author order by specific factors. Power pressures experienced when determining authorship were queried. Three case studies were also included to determine behavior for authorship and authorship order.

RESULTS

A total of 295 usable responses were received (30.2% response rate). A majority of faculty experienced power pressures when determining authorship. Justifying authorship for supervision of student projects and statistical analysis was common. Quantity and quality of contributions were the most common reason for justifying order. Writing substantial sections of an article was ranked the most important component in determining author order. Differences in justifying authorship based on promotion and tenure pressures were noted by academic rank, tenure status, and academic discipline. Familiarity with International Committee for Medical Journal Editors guidelines did not appear to influence behaviors.

CONCLUSIONS

There is a plurality of perceptions and attitudes among faculty in relation to authorship. A model for recognition of contributions is needed. More structured guidance in concert with moral and ethical principles would help to clarify how to best establish authorship and author order.

Scientific authorship: a primer for researchers

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) proposed the authorship criteria which can be employed by medics and allied specialists. Scholars who substantively contribute to research and writing, revise, approve final drafts for target journal submissions, and take responsibility for all aspects of the work deserve authorship. Increasing awareness of the ICMJE criteria, incorporating related points in journal instructions, and enforcing them in daily practice may have positive impact for healthcare. Instances of inappropriate authorship are ethical transgressions which can be avoided by editors employing strategies of author profile evaluations. There are several platforms for recording author accomplishments which may improve the discoverability of scholarly works and prevent unethical conduct.

Most publishers advise authors to submit their Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCID) at the manuscript submission. Other identifiers, such as Twitter handles, are also emerging as tools to stimulate post-publication communication and increase authors’ accountability for published articles.

The contributor roles for randomized controlled trials and the proposal for a novel CRediT-RCT

Background

The past decade has witnessed a rapid increase in the number of contributors per article, which has made explicitly defining the roles of each contributor even more challenging. The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) was developed to explicitly define author roles, but there is a lack of empirical data on how CRediT is used in clinical trials. This study aimed to provide empirical data on the use of CRediT in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and discuss some limitations of CRediT. A new taxonomy (CRediT-RCT) is proposed to explicitly define the author roles in RCTs.

Methods

The electronic database of PubMed was searched from July 2017 to October 2019 to identify component trials with a randomized controlled design. Publications from the Public Library of Science (PLoS) were included because they embed the CRediT roles within the authors' metadata rather than solely as a separate paragraph of text.

Results

A total of 446 articles involving 4,185 authors were included in the study. Most authors participated in the study's conceptualization (44.9%) and investigation (48.8%), but only a fraction of the authors participated in software management (7.4%). Many CRediT roles were correlated with each other: the strongest correlation was the one between funding acquisition and conceptualization (correlation metric =0.39), followed by the one between conceptualization and methodology (0.37). The authors who acquired funding (OR: 2.06; 95% CI: 1.54-2.76; P<0.001), did project administration (OR: 1.54; 95% CI: 1.17-2.03; P=0.002), performed supervision (OR: 2. 60; 95% CI: 1.93-3.52; P<0.001), wrote the original draft (OR: 4.83; 95% CI: 3.54-6.60; P<0.001), or were the first author (OR: 7.85; 95% CI: 5.71-10.87; P<0.001), were more likely to be the corresponding author. Also, while the original draft writing was significantly associated with the designation of the first author (OR: 37.49; 95% CI: 25.29-57.57; P<0.001), the first author did not perform review and editing (OR: 0.55; 95% CI: 0.40-0.75; P<0.001), supervision (OR: 0.49; 95% CI: 0.36-0.67; P<0.001), or resource management (OR: 0.71; 95% CI: 0.50-1.00; P=0.053). We further propose a novel Contributor Roles Taxonomy for Randomized Controlled Trials (CRediT-RCT) which includes 10 roles.

Conclusions

The present study provides empirical data on the use of CRediT for RCTs, and some limitations of the taxonomy are discussed. We further propose a new CRediT-RCT which includes 10 roles.