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Scientific Contribution List Categories Investigation: a comparison between three mainstream medical journals

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Abstract

How can we represent scientific contributions in articles through categories? The scientific contributions’ identification in articles is relevant with regard to issues such as authorship credit, transparency, and responsibility. The major medical journals have adopted the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to indicate the contributions in publications. However, the nomenclature of these contributions is different for each one, making it difficult to identify them when compared between journals. We analyze contributions list from 2024 articles with 20,098 authors, published in three mainstream medical journals: Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and PLoS Medicine. This study presents two main findings. First, a system grouping scientific contributions with seven categories divided into two groups: (1) Theory; and (2) Methodology and Logistics. Theory is composed of the following contributions: Study Concept, Study Supervision, Critical Revision and Funding and/or Support. While Methodology and Logistics have: Original Draft, Statistical Analysis, and Data Collection. Second, the major contributions are related to the categories related to the theoretical (Theory) argument of the articles, showing that these authors are the most experienced. Already Methodology and Logistics are essential to the application of theoretical concepts and support, representing substantial contributions. Thus, the grouping of the proposed categories can help authors to identify and indicate their contributions in articles more clearly, balancing the ethical issues related to the attribution of authorship to researchers. We also present a equivalence table to contribution categories between the three journals analyzed in this study.

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Data availability

Data are available at GitHub URI: https://github.com/EdsonMSouza/contributions_categories/tree/main/data.

Code availability

Code are available at Github URI: https://github.com/EdsonMSouza/contributions_categories/tree/main/software.

Notes

  1. Available at: http://credit.niso.org/.

  2. https://github.com/EdsonMSouza/contributions_categories.

  3. https://github.com/EdsonMSouza/contributions_categories.

  4. https://github.com/EdsonMSouza/contributions_categories.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank to Programa de Pós-graduação em Informática e Gestão do Conhecimento (PPGI) of Nove de Julho Universisty for academic support and Gobber, Charles F. by technical support and adjustments LaTeX tips in addition to comments about this paper.

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  1. Universidade Nove de Julho, Rua Vergueiro 235/249, São Paulo, SP, 01504001, Brazil

    Edson Melo de Souza, Jose Eduardo Storopoli & Wonder Alexandre Luz Alves

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  1. Edson Melo de Souza
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  2. Jose Eduardo Storopoli
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  3. Wonder Alexandre Luz Alves
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Contributions

WALA, JS, and EMS: Conceptualization; EMS, JS, WALA: Methodology; EMS, JS, WALA: Formal analysis and investigation; EMS, JS, WALA: Writing-original draft preparation; EMS, JS, WALA: Writing-review and editing; Funding acquisition: Not applicable; EMS: Resources; WALA and JS: Supervision.

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Correspondence to Edson Melo de Souza.

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de Souza, E.M., Storopoli, J.E. & Alves, W.A.L. Scientific Contribution List Categories Investigation: a comparison between three mainstream medical journals. Scientometrics 127, 2249–2276 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04315-8

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