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Prevalence of Honorary and Ghost Authorship in Cochrane Reviews
Graham Mowatt, MBA;
Liz Shirran, MSc;
Jeremy M. Grimshaw, MBChB,PhD;
Drummond Rennie, MD;
Annette Flanagin, RN,MA;
Veronica Yank, BA;
Graeme MacLennan, BSc(Hons);
Peter C. Gøtzsche, DrMedSci;
Lisa A. Bero, PhD
JAMA. 2002;287:2769-2771.
Context To determine the prevalence of honorary and ghost authorship in Cochrane reviews, how authorship is assigned, and the ways in which authors and Cochrane editorial teams contribute.
Methods Using a Web-based, self-administered survey, corresponding authors for 577 reviews published in issues 1 and 2 from 1999 of The Cochrane Library were invited to report on the prevalence of honorary and ghost authors, contributions by authors listed in the byline and members of Cochrane editorial teams, and identification of methods of assigning authorship. Responses were received for 362 reviews (63% response rate), which contained 913 authors.
Results One hundred forty-one reviews (39%) had evidence of honorary authors, 32 (9%) had evidence of ghost authors (most commonly a member of the Cochrane editorial team), and 9 (2%) had evidence of both honorary and ghost authors. The editorial teams contributed in a wide variety of ways to 301 reviews (83%). Authorship was decided by the group of authors (31%) or lead author (25%) in most reviews. Authorship order was assigned according to contribution in most reviews (76%). The 3 functions contributed to most by those listed in the byline were assessing the quality of included studies (83%), interpreting data (82%), and abstracting data from included studies (77%).
Conclusions A substantial proportion of reviews had evidence of honorary and ghost authorship. The Cochrane editorial teams contributed to most Cochrane reviews.
Author Affiliations: Health Services Research Unit (Dr Grimshaw and Messrs Mowatt and MacLennan) and Department of General Practice and Primary Care (Ms Shirran), University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland; JAMA, Chicago, Ill (Dr Rennie and Ms Flanagin); Institute for Health Policy Studies and School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco (Dr Rennie and Ms Yank); Nordic Cochrane Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark (Dr Gøtzsche); and Institute for Health Policy Studies and Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University of California, San Francisco (Dr Bero).
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