Have you heard the story about the young, Orthodox Jewish fellow who decides to stop keeping kosher, so he goes to the local coffee shop and orders a cheeseburger with ham and bacon and a glass of milk?
Some retraction notices put us in mind of that tale (true, by the way). Consider the following one from the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, in regard to a 2010 paper by Spanish scientists titled “Nationwide Sentinel Surveillance of Bloodstream Candida Infections in 40 Tertiary Care Hospitals in Spain”:
Volume 48, no. 11, p. 4200–4206, 2010. We hereby retract this article. After publication of the article, we realized that we had failed to cite the article “Epidemiology of candidemia in Brazil: a nationwide sentinel surveillance of candidemiain eleven medical centers” by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, B. J.Park, S. A. Nouér, B. Arthington-Skaggs, D. A. da Matta, D. Warnock, and J. Morgan for the Brazilian Network Candidemia Study (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). This article should have been cited as reference 9 in the References section instead of the article by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, R. Salomão, M. L. Branchini, R. Richtmann, A. Derossi, and S. B. Wey (Diagn. Microbiol. Infect. Dis. 34:281–286, 1999). Moreover, we realized after our article had been published that major parts of the text had been plagiarized almost verbatim from Colombo et al. (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). Prof. Cisterna and Dr. Ezpeleta express their deep and sincere apologies to Prof. Colombo and his Brazilian Network Candidemia Study team, to the clinical microbiology community, and to Journal of Clinical Microbiology readers for this embarrassing situation. In addition, we state that Jesus Guinea, Julio García-Rodríguez, Juliana Esperalba, and Benito Regueiro should not have appeared in the author byline, as they contributed to the paper only by supplying isolates and clinical data for the patients and were not involved in the writing of the paper.
Whew! That’s a lot to digest. We need a nap.
Plagiarism, shoddy — if not downright dishonest — referencing and possible author shenanigans. Definitely not kosher. We say possible shenanigans because while we’ve covered cases in which author names have been forged, we’ve not to our knowledge written about instances in which researchers who contributed to a study had their name stricken from a paper. (Do you really need to take the names off a retracted article, anyway? And, while we’re in parentheses, it seems possible to divine who the guilty party is here: A little like playing Clue, simply start scratching off names of likely suspects.)
We have requests for comment out to the journal editor, Cisterna and Colombo, who appears to be the most aggrieved party, and will update this post if we hear anything.
Meanwhile, the topic of authorship is fascinating and complicated. As this notice suggests, the question of whose name appears on a manuscript is clearly political and jealously guarded. Perhaps that’s as it should be. But does the person who collects the data really deserve less credit than the lab head who was on sabbatical while the vast majority of the work was being conducted, or the section chief who likes to stick fingers in every pie simply to accumulate numbers on a CV?
Please see an update to this story.
Surely taking their names off the paper is doing them a favor, because it means they don’t have a paper retracted.
Indeed that’s probably why they wanted to be removed. They contributed samples, but had no part in writing the paper, which is where the dodginess arose. You can see why they wouldn’t want to be implicated in the retracted paper.
I think the reference issue is just shoddy, picking the wrong “Colombo et al” in their ref manager. Not too uncommon either, I would think.
The authorship issue is not an uncommon discussion either, but at least here we have the Vancouver guidelines:
Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.
Looks to me like the stricken authors did not meet condition 2.
It’s the “substantial ” in point 1, and the “critically…important” in points 2 that is often a considerable discussion (which is generally messier than the discussions on who the first author, senior author, and/or corresponding author should be).
The Vancouver requirement for authors to approve the final version can be used perversely: e.g. by not showing them the final version of a manuscript, a lab head could publish their student’s results without listing the student as an author, and defend the practice by saying the Vancouver guidelines exclude them. In this way, the Vancouver guidelines can be abused to allow plagiarism, i.e. the use of someones words or ideas without attribution.
> I think the reference issue is just shoddy, picking the wrong “Colombo et al” in their
> ref manager. Not too uncommon either, I would think.
Really? The paper that should have been referenced is the one that the plagiarism came from. I don’t think this was accidental at all.
This paper was based on a sentinel survey, so the number of people collecting data was large. Most of them are credited collectively, as the “Spanish Candidemia Surveillance Group.” In that kind of study, questions of authorship are always going to be especially fuzzy. It seems to be fairly routine to pick out a few individuals for special mention. But it surely isn’t practical to meet Vancouver condition 3, and the fact that only 1 or 2 of the authors knew about the article in advance isn’t suspicious or unethical in itself. I’ve got no gripe with the Vancouver guidelines. I’m just pointing out that a large sentinel study is a peculiar case to which the guidelines probably should not be applied.
Dear Toby White,
Large, mutlicenter groups are not exempt from the requirements for authorship. It is not in the small print, but at the core of the guidelines for authorship.
It is your opinion that “a large sentinel study is a peculiar case to which the guidelines probably should not be applied”, but the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals:
Ethical Considerations in the Conduct and Reporting of Research: Authorship and Contributorship” section of the guidelines specifically states that this is not so, and that you do have to meet “Vancouver” conditions 1, 2, and 3, not just 3 even.
“When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript (3). These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship/contributorship defined above, and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms”.
From http://www.icmje.org/ethical_1author.html
In full, where you can see that the issue of large, mutlicenter groups is the second item.
* Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.
* When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript (3). These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship/contributorship defined above, and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals generally list other members of the group in the Acknowledgments. The NLM indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript; it also lists the names of collaborators if they are listed in Acknowledgments.
* Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship.
* All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
* Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.
My opinion is that authors should stick to these rules, otherwise they are not true authors.
Two wrongs don’t make a right – i.e., it’s not okay for the person who just collected the data to be an author because some section chief can use his (or her) authority to get his name on papers.
Marco’s guidelines are also adopted by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Yes, determining authorship has a “wiggly” component to it. But, the guidelines can be helpful when deciding on authorship and the key ingredient is an intellectual contribution.
An interesting recent trend is that some journals are now checking with me to make sure I know I have been listed as an author.
Lynn, just some historical background: the ICMJE came out of the Vancouver group, which drafted the Vancouver Guidelines.
Oh, thanks!
Would you please stop giving religious analogies in your blog, It makes your article less interesting.
Thanks in advance!!
Kosher doesn’t mean anything to lot of people, can you give some other examples to compare, so that we understand well. Keep non-American readers in your mind while writing up. Avoid religious connotations!
I just bought a bottle of Kosher 3-methyl cyclohexenone, manufactured in Germany. That rules out the complaint that it is an American term (Israel is across the ocean after all), or not relavent to scientists. I personally understood and appreciated the analogy…it was neither preaching religion nor was it denigrating it.
I liked the kosher story. It’s more cultural than religious. People need to lighten up.
The web page with the retraction notice says at the top
Retraction for Cisterna et al., J. Clin. Microbiol. 48 (11) 4200-4206.
Retraction for Colombo et al., J. Clin. Microbiol. 44 (8) 2816-2823.
The second line links to the Colombo paper. Has that been retracted or is this another JCM mistake
I can’t stand the religious “jokes” on this blog. Some seem to enjoy it from their responses but can you keep the blog kosher (of religious remarks – I googled it).
I fully agree with people who say that intellectual contribution should be the only contribution that makes one an author. Not even considering the possible perversions that other types of contributions can cause. I never understood the rules of the Vancouver or similar attempts to make authorship “inclusive” in the activist meaning of the word.
Some details I think can be mentioned:
Authorship can be deserved (for other reasons), if one only read the final version.
Some intellectual contributions can be acknowledged only, without giving authorship, but the acknowledgement must fully describe the item. I hate the expression “giving authorship”. This should come naturally, debates are slightly inappropriate in a normal situation.
Kosher here, I think, would be relevant if the Orthodox was retracted or may be thriving in another department so to speak; we just don’t know what happened to him. In other situations it can be very helpful. For instance, “hutzpa” has no equivalent in English; it has the full-bodied equivalent in Russian – nagloct’, nagletz, and I often miss it.