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Category: Project

Description: The purpose of the present meta-epidemiological study is (1) to identify the proportion of authors that, based on their self-declared contributions, did not met the minimum criteria for authorship as established by the ICMJE and McNutt recommendations, (2) to quantify the difference between these two recommendations, and (3) to identify the proportion of authors that contributed exclusively funding or materials to a study. For this reason, we will perform a cross-sectional study of CRediT statements published in scholarly articles. We will contact three publishing companies, the Public Library of Sciences (PLoS), Elsevier, and Wiley to obtain CRediT statements. We will ask the publishers to provide every CRediT statement for every author of any article published in any of their journals. We will classify whether authors fulfilled minimum authorship recommendations advised by the ICMJE and by McNutt et al (2008) depending on the combination of items that they declared to have contributed in the CRediT statements. In addition, we will classify whether CRediT statements were suggestive of one specific authorship malpractice, that we defined “supply authorship”, and is characterized by providing exclusively funding or materials to a scholarly article. In order to define the combinations of items that are consider the minimum contribution to fulfil authorship recommendations, two investigators (ND, RMR) will independently evaluate the criteria for authorship (ICMJE, McNutt, “supply”) and develop a logical operation of CRediT items (using AND and OR) for each criterion. If there is persistent disagreement regarding the combinations, a third operator with methodological experience on authorship (VL) will be consulted as an arbiter. The primary outcomes of this study will be: - The proportion of authors that provided CRediT statements that did not suffice to justify authorship based on ICMJE recommendations - The proportion of authors that provided CRediT statements that did not suffice to justify authorship based on McNutt recommendations - The difference in these proportions - The proportion of authors that based on the CRediT statements provided only funding and materials (supply authors)