• Rafael Ruiz-Pérez, Diego Marcos-Cartagena, and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar.
• EC3: Evaluación de la Ciencia y la Comunicación Científica, Departamento de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad de Granada, Granada, España. rruiz@ugr.es
• Rev. Esp. Salud Publica. 2010 Nov 1;84(6):809-25.

BackgroundScientific journals have been recognized to have the authority to register both the ownership of ideas and the validity of published knowledge. This paper explores the extent to which the editorial policies of journals contribute to ensure the accuracy of scientific authorship.MethodsCross-sectional study of scientific authorship criteria used by 23 Spanish medical journals included in Journal Citation Reports 2008 and evaluation of their fulfilment to the uniformity requirements URM of ICMJE. Criteria have been structured in observational items and six levels of fulfilment have been established in order to quantify its adjustment to URM.Results52% of journals do not make a reference to URM, 39% only provides some information on the conditions to be respected by the signatories of an article and only 26% (6 magazines) comply with URM. 61% of the journals declare information regarding the responsibility contracted by authors. 35% of the journals give some type guidelines as to the number of authors but no one mentions signature order. As for acknowledgments and corresponding address instructions, 61% declare it but 30,4% only properly formulate their aims.ConclusionsOnly 48% of the journals include one or some instructions related with scientific authorship. Results coincide with those of other studies. Despite the existence of an international standard such as URM, authorship criteria provided by journals are scarce and uneven. The assertion that URM is universally well-known by medical journals is questioned.

9 keywords...

hide…