Authors: Ana Ivaniš Darko Hren Dario Sambunjak Matko Marušić Ana Marušić
Publish Date: 2008/06/03
Volume: 23, Issue: 9, Pages: 1303-1310
Abstract
Eight hundred sixtyfive authors of 181 manuscripts submitted to the Croatian Medical Journal from January to July 2005 were randomly allocated into 2 groups 456 authors 94 manuscripts received an ordinal rating form to rate their contributions to the submitted manuscript in 12 categories on a scale from 0 none to 4 full whereas 409 authors 87 manuscripts received a binary rating form to tick the categories in which they made a contributionThe ordinal rating form identified twice as many authors 879 as meeting the ICMJE criteria than the binary rating form 392 P 001 The group answering the ordinal rating form also had 5 times more manuscripts 716 with all authors meeting the ICMJE criteria than the binary rating form group 155 P 001 The fraction of authors who reported contributions on each item on the binary rating form was similar to the fraction of authors who reported at least moderate participation to the same items on the ordinal rating form except “Final approval of the article”Ordinal scales for reporting authors’ contributions to manuscripts were more sensitive than tick boxes for assessing the appropriateness of authorship The exception is “Final approval of the article” which should be considered a dichotomous variable and may not be appropriate for the ICMJE definition of authorship
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