Orphan Papers and Ghostwriting: The Case against the ICMJE Criterion of Authorship

Abstract

Although popular, I argue that the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) account of authorship is flawed. It inadvertently allows for practices that it was designed to prevent. In addition, it creates a new category of authorless papers—orphan papers. The original World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) criterion is preferable.

Keywords:

• authorship
• ghostwriting
• ICMJE
• orphan papers
• WAME

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Alicia Hall, Trisha Phillips, Zubin Master, David Resnik, and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable feedback.

Notes

1. As a reviewer kindly pointed out, there are two different WAME discussions of authorship—the original criterion that I discuss here (WAME, 2007) and later guidance (WAME, 2012) which is quite similar to the ICMJE criterion (even recommending familiarity with the ICMJE standard). I think that the newer WAME position is a step backwards, as it blurs different approaches to defining authorship. In this paper, I refer to the original WAME criterion; the newer WAME discussion of authorship has similar problems to the ICMJE account.

2. There is not a perfect split in the literature as some studies combine the two definitions. For example, Mowatt et al. (2002) defines a ghost author “as a person who, in the opinion of the corresponding author, had made a contribution that merited authorship or who had assisted in drafting the review but was not listed as an author or mentioned in the acknowledgment section of the review.”

3. A reviewer raised this helpful point.