Study Collaborators Included in PubMed

Via NLM Technical Bulletin:

As of November 2007, there were over 57,000 occurrences of group (corporate) authors in MEDLINE/PubMed with over 17,000 citations with no co-occurring personal authors. Not everyone involved in a group is actually writing or authoring the paper, however. NLM agrees (...) that "Authorship credit should be based on

1. substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data
2. drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
3. final approval of the version to be published

Taking these and other factors into consideration, NLM decided that it is time to include the individual names associated with the group authors in MEDLINE/PubMed. Therefore, when a group name is included as an author, the respective group member names appearing in the article will be acknowledged as collaborators but not associated with authorship. This significant enhancement allows PubMed users to identify articles to which an individual has contributed, whether as an author or as a collaborator. NLM has implemented this new feature routinely for MEDLINE citations created beginning in March 2008 if the article was published in 2008 forward.


See also:

• Compete, collaborate, compel: Nature Genetics 39, 931 (2007) doi:10.1038/ng0807-931 . Procedures for microattribution need to be established by journals...
• Publishing DReaMs