Background: Honorary authorship refers to the practice of naming an individual who has made little or no contribution to a publication as an author. Honorary authorship inflates the output estimates of honorary authors and deflates the value of the work by authors who truly merit authorship. This manuscript presents the protocol for a systematic review that will assess the prevalence of five honorary authorship issues in health sciences. Methods: Surveys of authors of scientific publications in health sciences that assess prevalence estimates will be eligible. No selection criteria will be set for the time point for measuring outcomes, the setting, the language of the publication, and the publication status. Eligible manuscripts are searched from inception onwards in PubMed, Lens.org, and Dimensions.ai. Two calibrated authors will independently search, determine eligibility of manuscripts, and conduct data extraction. The quality of each review outcome for each eligible manuscript will be assessed with a 14-item checklist developed and piloted for this review. Data will be qualitatively synthesized and quantitative syntheses will be performed where feasible. Criteria for precluding quantitative syntheses were defined a priori. The pooled random effects double arcsine transformed summary event rates of five outcomes on honorary authorship issues with the pertinent 95% confidence intervals will be calculated if these criteria are met. Summary estimates will be displayed after back-transformation. Stata software (Stata Corporation, College Station, TX, USA) version 16 will be used for all statistical analyses. Statistical heterogeneity will be assessed using Tau2 and Chi2 tests and I2 to quantify inconsistency. Discussion: The outcomes of the planned systematic review will give insights in the magnitude of honorary authorship in health sciences and could direct new research studies to develop and implement strategies to address this problem. However, the validity of the outcomes could be influenced by low response rates, inadequate research design, weighting issues, and recall bias in the eligible surveys. Systematic review registration: This protocol was registered a priori in the Open Science Framework (OSF) link: https://osf.io/5nvar/.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of survey research was conducted to estimate honorary authorship prevalence in health sciences. We searched PubMed, Lens.org, and Dimensions.ai. until January 5 2023. Methodological quality was assessed and quantitative syntheses were conducted. Nineteen surveys were included and rated as having low methodological quality. We found a pooled prevalence of 26% [95% CI 21–31] (6 surveys, 2758 respondents) of researchers that perceived co-author(s) as honorary on the publication at issue (when they were not referred to any authorship criteria). That prevalence was 18% [95% CI 15–21] (11 surveys, 4272 respondents) when researchers were referred to Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) authorship criteria, and 51% [95% CI 47–56] (15 surveys, 5111 respondents) when researchers were asked to declare their co-author(s) contributions on the publication at issue (and these were then compared to ICMJE criteria). 10% of researchers [95% CI 9–12] (11 surveys, 3,663 respondents) reported being approached by others to include honorary author(s) on the publication at issue and 16% [95% CI 13–18] (2 surveys, 823 respondents) admitted adding (an) honorary author(s). Survey research consistently indicates that honorary authorship in the health sciences is highly prevalent, however the quality of the surveys’ methods and reporting needs improvement.
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Calls have been made for improving transparency in conducting and reporting research, improving work climates, and preventing detrimental research practices. To assess attitudes and practices regarding these topics, we sent a survey to authors, reviewers, and editors. We received 3,659 (4.9%) responses out of 74,749 delivered emails. We found no significant differences between authors’, reviewers’, and editors’ attitudes towards transparency in conducting and reporting research, or towards their perceptions of work climates. Undeserved authorship was perceived by all groups as the most prevalent detrimental research practice, while fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and not citing prior relevant research, were seen as more prevalent by editors than authors or reviewers. Overall, 20% of respondents admitted sacrificing the quality of their publications for quantity, and 14% reported that funders interfered in their study design or reporting. While survey respondents came from 126 different countries, due to the survey’s overall low response rate our results might not necessarily be generalizable. Nevertheless, results indicate that greater involvement of all stakeholders is needed to align actual practices with current recommendations.
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