Policies of dental journals for reporting and monitoring authorship and contributorship

Abstract

Authorship contribution is an important issue that has been discussed frequently in the medical literature. There are many reported cases of 'guest' authors (who sign as authors without meeting authorship criteria) and 'ghost' authors (who are credited to get authorship, but for some reason do not sign the article). Therefore, clear and transparent policies for reporting authorship/contributorship are needed in scientific journals. The objective of this survey was to assess the authorship and contributorship policies that are made publically available on the homepages of dental journals. The policies of 64 impact factorĝ€"ranked dental journals were assessed with a 6-item checklist based on the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines for authorship/contributorship. Most dental journals partially reported the ICMJE guidelines, and therefore the improvement of this reporting is a requirement to promote transparency and integrity in dental research. Moreover, dental journals should develop strategies to improve author adherence to available guidelines for authorship and contributorship. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.