Intended for healthcare professionals

Letters Honorary and ghost authorship

Let’s simply scrap authorship and move to contributorship

BMJ 2012; 344 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e157 (Published 10 January 2012) Cite this as: BMJ 2012;344:e157
  1. Richard Smith, chair1
  1. 1Patients Know Best, London SW4 0LD, UK
  1. richardswsmith{at}yahoo.co.uk

Why do science journals stick to authorship rather than moving wholesale to contributorship?1

These days science is rarely undertaken by individuals. Most research is conducted by teams, often large teams with people with very different skills. A binary division into authors and non-authors is bound to be arbitrary and to cause …

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