A group of surgeons in Germany have retracted a 2020 paper for several errors and because a senior researcher says he should have been included as a co-author.
The article, “Assessment of Intraoperative Flow Measurement as a Quality Control During Carotid Endarterectomy: A Single-Center Analysis,” appeared on the website of the Scandanavian Journal of Surgery in early November. The authors, led by Anna Cyrek, were affiliated with the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at University Hospital Essen.
According to the retraction notice:
The Corresponding author notified the journal Editor and SAGE of the following errors in the article:
The carotid endarterectomy program as described in the manuscript was started under Prof. J.N. Hoffmann’s directorship of the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery. He and other members of his team should have been included as authors on the manuscript.
A typo in the recruitment period, it should be: March 2012- March 2015 and not March 2013- March 2015.
Postoperative vascular duplex ultrasound was not performed by the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery, but by the Department of Neurology. The statement that all patients received the examination within 24 hours was incorrect. The correct statement would be that duplex ultrasound was performed in all patients as soon as the patients’ condition permitted the examination. In fact, only 14% of patients were examined within 24 hours, but 85% were examined within 96 hours.
Furthermore, the correct description of the procedure performed by the neurologists (line 149-150) would be “Also, angle-corrected flow velocity systolic and diastolic in cm/sec was measured and analysed” instead of “Also, volume flow rates were measured three times in each artery, and the mean value was used for this analysis”.
Due to the collection of errors, the article has been retracted. The authors apologise for the honest mistakes.
J. Hoffmann is Johannes Hoffmann, a flautist cum surgeon who is now the public face of the Clinic for Vascular Surgery and Phlebology at Contilia, a health care conglomerate in Essen.
Cyrek told us:
Prof. Hoffmann was the head of the vascular surgery section at the University Hospital Essen between 2012 and October 2016. I started the similar project in 2016 and submitted it to Annals of Vascular Surgery. This project was rejected at the time because a control group was missing.
In 2018 I started a new project … expanded it and submitted it to SJS. This manuscript was then published in October 2020.
In March 2021 I got a call from Prof. Hoffmann, who was annoyed about the lack of authorship.
I was not aware that colleagues who had already left the clinic and were no longer involved in the work also had to be listed as co-authors. After contacting the University Office, I decided to take this step and corrected the authorship accordingly.
We asked Paula Salminen, the editor-in-chief of the journal, whether the paper could have remained if the authorship issue had not arisen. Her response:
the authors reported a major error in their analyses. With the latter issue, the only option was to retract the paper as a correction would not have been sufficient.
However, Salminen declined to answer our questions about whether she’d seen any evidence that Hoffmann contributed enough to the research to merit authorship.
Hoffman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Cyrek added:
I have now officially rewritten all co-authors for permission and will resubmit the manuscript with ALL authors.
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Borderline. seems like some of the work was initiated when Hoffmann was still at the institution, so a case can be made that authorship is appropriate. That being said, it would help if even the more clinical journals had a more transparent policy on listing specific author contributions, to minimize gift authorships.
I don’t see that leaving an institution has relevance to ones contribution to to a publication – if you significant work that contributed to the research in a paper, then you should be an author on the paper.
On the other hand, being head of a unit at one point does not necessarily make one an author for any papers coming from that unit in perpetuity.
Why does your place of work at some arbitrary time have any relevance to authorship?
I agree that being involved in the department should not warrant authorship. The journal’s own guidelines state that “Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship.” So, why would a section head, who wasn’t present when the project was started, be included as an author unless they also helped design the project?
I tend to agree with Warren, the key point is the buzzword significant which as I understand is scientific and intellectual contribution and that should be of equivalent weightage to other coauthors. Just holding of an administrative position doesn’t make one eligible to earn authorship. having said that, I would also like to add that at the time of analysing the data, the team of coauthors should have approached the former investigator asking whether he would be interested in contributing in terms of data analysis interpretation and writing to justify his inclusion as one of the coauthors.
Goodness. Can you imagine the chaos in the literature if all people who were previous directors of programs & institutes expected to be included in publications when they had left the institution & had nothing to do with a new study? There has always been a bit of a problem in the medical literature about including individuals who have not directly contributed to the work. There is a way to be inclusive & acknowledge previous contributions to an institute or program – it is in the Acknowledgement section of a paper. Including people on papers with token authorship devalues the genuine hard work of all others on the paper & should be outlawed.
There are untold thousands of patents that would be invalidated in court, if they were ever so challenged, due to administrators, managers, and group leaders being added as inventors when they actually made no intellectual contribution to the patented invention. I have no doubt that the same thing applies to scientific publications.