Centre of Expertise Urban Vitality

Automatically listing senior members of departments as co-authors is highly prevalent in health sciences

meta-analysis of survey research

Article

A systematic review with meta-analysis was conducted to assess the prevalence of automatically listing (a) senior member(s) of a department as co-author(s) on all submitted articles in health sciences and the prevalence of degrees of support on a 5-point justification scale. Survey research was searched in PubMed, Lens.org, and Dimensions.ai. until January 5 2023. We assessed the methodological quality of studies and conducted quantitative syntheses. We identified 15 eligible surveys, that provided 67 results, all of which were rated as having low quality. A pooled estimate of 20% [95% CI 16–25] (10 surveys, 3619 respondents) of researchers in various health sciences reported that a senior member of their department was automatically listed as an author on all submitted articles. Furthermore, 28% [95% CI 22–34] of researchers (10 surveys, 2180 respondents) felt that this practice was ‘never’, 24% [95% CI 22–27] ‘rarely’, 25% [95% CI 23–28] ‘sometimes’, 13% [95% CI 9–17] ‘most of the time’, and 8% [95% CI 6–9] ‘always justified’. The practice of automatically assigning senior members of departments as co-authors on all submitted manuscripts may be common in the health sciences; with those admitting to this practice finding it unjustified in most cases.<br/><br/>Registration of the protocol The protocol was registered in Open Science Framework. Link: https://osf.io/4eywp/.

Reference Meursinge Reynders, R. A., Cavagnetto, D., ter Riet, G., Di Girolamo, N., & Malički, M. (2024). Automatically listing senior members of departments as co-authors is highly prevalent in health sciences: meta-analysis of survey research. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 5883. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-55966-x
Published by  Urban Vitality 1 January 2024

Publication date

Jan 2024

Author(s)

Reint A. Meursinge Reynders
Davide Cavagnetto
Nicola Di Girolamo
Mario Malički

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